Despite the somewhat high-techy nature of it, we believe that using a small scale to weigh tea by the gram (rather than dosing out the leaf by the teaspoon or tablespoon ) is the easiest and most accurate method of portioning out the desired amount of any tea.
In Granny’s day most tea sold was black tea that was cut into small, fine pieces that could fit nicely in a metal tea ball. Not so today with long and leafy artisan black, green, white, Pu-erh and oolong teas that can defy easy measuring.
How much to use? Am I doing this right? We often hear from our tea enthusiast customers that they are stymied by the size and shape of various tea leaves, and not sure of the accuracy of their measure when made by volume rather than by weight.
Many are concerned that they are using too much, or not enough, leaf to steep their tea. For most of us, the larger the leaf the more cumbersome it is to measure it out by the teaspoon or tablespoon.
But with a digital gram scale, weighing out the required 2, 3 , 4 or 5 grams of leaf is easy and foolproof. Customers who now weight their tea tell us that they are amazed to find that their tea tastes consistently better than when they measured it the old way. They are happy with the results and feel that they are now getting richer, fuller flavor from their tea. Which of course is the idea!
And, of course, when the same tea is used regularly, we learn to ‘eyeball’ the amount so that we just ‘know’ how much to use and don’t need to measure quite so accurately. But for those of us who enjoy trying all sorts of different teas, weight measure is critical the first few times that we measure a tea.