Measuring tea

The standard recommendation

The standard recommendation is to start with one teaspoon of dry tea for every teacup of water (a teacup is six ounces).

The problems

Most of us do not make teacup quantities of tea, and in fact, most of us do not use teacups. Furthermore, a teaspoon of broken leaf tea will be more tea than a teaspoon of whole leaf tea. Follow the standard recommendation and your everyday tea may be the right strength, but the expensive whole leaf tea you bought for special occasions will be too weak and will make you wonder why you spent the extra money.

The solutions

There is the old joke: which one weighs more? A pound of sand, or a pound of cotton balls? Obviously, they weigh the same, so the better way to phrase the question is to ask which weighs more, a cup of cotton balls or a cup of sand.

In the case of tea brewing, this is not a high-precision task. If you just make an attempt to get close, it will probably be close enough.

There are two solutions. The best is to weigh the tea. If you have a gram scale, weigh out 3 grams per 250 milliliters of water. (If you do not have a suitable scale, consider buying one. It is possible to find a suitable scale for under $20. The least expensive scale seen recently on the internet is less than $4. Standard measuring cups for liquid in the U.S. are marked in milliliters as well as ounces and cups. 250 milliliters is slightly more than 8 ounces or 1 cup). Most of us have one of these in our kitchens.

The other solution is to simply measure more teaspoons of tea as the tea leaves get bigger.