Tips for brewing loose leaf black tea
- Take the leaves out of the water. - The key is to take the leaves out of the water after 3-5 minutes. Do not leave the tea leaves sitting in the water in the cup or teapot after this time.
- Preheat the teapot - Preheating the teapot is essential for developing the perfect flavour. Preheated teapots will keep the water temperature high throughout the brewing.
- Use boiling water - Do not use cooler water as it will not bring out the rich flavours in the black tea leaves.
- Use small broken leaves for more caffeine - Tea with smaller, broken leaves contain more caffeine.
- Avoid adding milk or sugar directly to the teapot - Adding milk will change the temperature that the tea is brewed at. Pour your tea into your cup before adding milk, sugar or honey.
- Picker's Pocket recommend approximately 2 grams of tea to be brewed for each cup as that will be perfect for a great tasting cup.
Perfect black tea temperature
Black tea leaves are easy to brew & in general they lend themselves to suiting most people's tastes. These are the leaves that people enjoy black or add sugar, milk or honey to. Be careful though, the broken orange pekoe (breakfast style) types of teas are those that can be readily added to. Some stronger Earl Grey brews, and our Wild Teas are best enjoyed without milk added. Of course this is personal preference. Our tip is to try it black first & then decide if you would like to add flavours.
Black tea is easy to brew, and it’s a great healthy alternative to coffee. Boiling a kettle & pouring the water over a tea bag is often the first contact many of us had with tea.
With loose tea things can be a bit more exciting & more of a personal, relaxing experience. Although you can still brew black tea leaves with boiling water, some changes in flavours might surprise you if you slightly change your brewing time.
How to brew black tea
Picker's Pocket high quality loose-leaf teas can be brewed multiple times due to the way they are harvested and processed. There is a chinese saying that your first brew is for your enemy, your second for a friend & the third brew is for yourself.
The flavours in artisanal teas are revealed throughout the multiple brewing sessions & some of the exceptional flavour notes are only discovered when brewed multiple times.
Some of the full leaf Ceylon black teas might give more than 5 excellent infusions, each with different flavours coming through. Picker's Pocket Chai Teas with a black tea base are also good to be brewed multiple times. The spices they use are not powder, they are whole pieces, allowing the flavours to keep infusing your brew multiple times.
The really fine, lower quality tea used in tea bags will only give one full flavoured brew due to the fact that they are highly processed & the surface area of the grains is so small that all the flavour is lost in the first brew. It is because of this that it can be easy to end up with a bitter cup of tea from a tea bag.
