It struck me that a lot of people might not know how to get into Tea like we have. I think a basic guide is in order to help everyone get going when exploring this wonderful new world that has opened up for us. The cost to get off the ground is very low and a lot of these hints will save you a lot of time and aggravation. I’ll break it down into parts you need, many of them are durable, and ingredients, then procedure to make a spectacular cup of tea (or coffee even) cup-by-cup.
What you will need:
1) Tap water is best if you trust it. Spring water if you don’t. Avoid special waters like SmartWater or squeaky clean like vapor distilled water. If you are loath to buy your water in a jug, then Brita or Pur is your next best bet. You want your water to be freshly drawn, but it’s not essential.
2) Boiling Kettle – It’s romantic to get a teapot and put it on the stove and wait for it to whistle. This doesn’t conserve resources and is expensive in natural gas terms to run. A far better (and safer) alternative is the electric automatic boiling kettle. The model I am fond of is the one I have at work, that’s the basic plain-jane Rival Electric Kettle. I bought it at Walmart for $12. You only need one that can boil water and turn off. If you wanted to get really frou frou about it, a kettle with a thermometer that could keep water at 200 would be ideal.
3) Next you need a Finum Brewing Basket. This item is really durable. It’s got a superfine mesh which you can put your loose tea or coffee in and then insert that into your favorite cup. It has a lid which you can use to top the device to keep heat from leaking out or you can use it to receive the basket after you pull it out of the hot water in the cup. Or both. It washes up with tapwater and needs no other cleaning. Be gentle with fingertips and avoid scratching it with fingernails. If you have tea or coffee compacted in this basket, you can tip it upside down over the trash and tap the bottom with a spoon and everything will come out neat as you please.
4) Cups. If you have a mug or cup you like, use it. Preferably no more than 6 to 8 ounces. A standard coffee mug will work just fine. You know it’s sized right when you put the Finum in it, the little plastic wings rest of the edges of the cup and the bottom barely if ever touches the bottom of the cup. I can really recommend Bodum Bistro Double-Wall Mugs for this, if you have a little to spend on nice cups. Bodum mugs are made of borosilicate glass, they are double-walled and insulate to keep your fingers from burning, they retain heat very well, and they clean up in a snap. They are also totally non-reactive.
5) Timer. You need any basic timer. Your iPhone has one built in, other phones do too. You need a way to reliably countdown from 3 minutes to zero for tea or 4 minutes to zero for coffee. If you can do that, you can also set your timer to 11m30s which is how long just-off-the-boil water takes to get from scalding to drinkable.
6) Looseleaf Tea or Coffee. You can get all your looseleaf tea mail ordered from our shop here in Portage Michigan. The shop’s name is Chocolatea and they have an online store with shipping options. Everything they sell is top-quality and I can personally vouch that if you buy from them, you will enjoy every minute of what you get in the mail. Tea is not like coffee. Tea isn’t a ticking time bomb. It doesn’t get crappy with age and it can keep for a really long time without degrading in quality. One tea, Pu-erh actually ages like wine and gets better with age, however the Pu-erh that Chocolatea sells is ready-to-rock-and-roll, so you don’t have to wait to enjoy it. If Coffee is more your thing I can recommend Dunkin Donuts Regular Roast as an acceptable coffee. Starbucks is okay, but it’s way too expensive for eh coffee. Really great coffee, at least that I’ve found can be ordered online from Death Wish Coffee. I can also personally vouch for this coffee as it is exceptional in character and packs a wallop of caffeine.
7) Gram Scale. There is a great little handy digital pocket scale at Amazon for less than $10. It’s got great resolution and a nice display and it’s small enough to be pocketable. Some people will tell you to measure tea by the teaspoon, that’s useless. Measure tea and coffee by weight! You’ll be much happier.
Procedure:
To make a great cup of Tea (everything but Yerba Mate) – put your empty Finum basket on your scale, set it to grams and tare it to zero. Then sprinkle in enough tea to get to 5 grams. Take the basket off the scale and put in your Bodum cup. Get your water to 200 degrees (or 212, it’s not really that much of a problem for everything but white teas, they’re picky at 160–170 degrees) and pour the water into your Finum basket in the cup almost to the brim. After that, set your timer to 3 minutes (10 for Yerba Mate) and watch it closely. Tea, like Coffee can oversteep/overbrew and you get a nasty cup of turpentine for your troubles. I can’t express it enough, timing is EVERYTHING. More than temperature, more than the water, more than anything else. TIME. If you are brewing Oolong you will notice that the tea is full-leaf and expands like a sponge when you steep it, so what looked like little natty bits ends up being a basket full of full tea leaves. After the cup of tea has steeped for 3 minutes, pull the Finum out, let it drip out for a few moments and put on paper towel or it’s lid. Don’t throw away your steeped tea! Then set your timer to exactly 11 minutes 30 seconds and start it. During this time the tea will go from undrinkably hot to PERFECT. You can at any time add sweeteners if you like. Splenda, Nutrasweet, Sugar, Agave Nectar, Honey, Simple Syrup, or even Golden Syrup are all great sweeteners for tea. I’ve found that Agave gives the end tea an odd flavor overtone, so tread carefully. I like my tea very sweet, so I use two packets of Splenda. You can sweeten anytime you please. After you’ve enjoyed your tea you can put the Finum back in your cup, get your water hot again and re-steep. This is called Gong-Fu, and is a well-respected tradition in China. All teas can at least re-steep three times before they kind of fall on their ass. The only notable exception to this is Oolong. Oolong can resteep ten to twenty times and the further you go, the more subtle flavors end up in your cup. A little hint, after the first steep, which is always at 3 minutes, each subsequent steep you can add a minute, up to 5. So steep 1, 3 minutes. Steep 2, 4 minutes, Steep 3, 5 minutes, Steep 4, 5 minutes. You keep going with that pattern and you won’t go wrong. If you’ve exhausted your Finum’s contents of their goodness save the remains in a cup or bowl. You can throw these remains on Hydrangea, Roses, or Blueberry bushes and the remains will contribute plant-friendly acids to the soil. Never throw used tea or coffee in the trash if you can help it. The remains shouldn’t be landfill, not when they can make acid-loving plants thrive.
As for Coffee, put your empty, clean Finum basket on your scale, tare it to zero and sprinkle in 10 grams of ground coffee. A standard grind will be fine, you’ll get a little camp-coffee or grit at the bottom of your cup as the solids drop out of solution, but it’s not unpleasant. When I drink the cup of coffee to 25% full I like to swirl the remains around which picks up the sediment off the bottom and then I drink the remains. If you like coffee and don’t mind a wee touch of grit, it’s not bad. If you can swing it, a grind set for French Press will be even better and have less grit in the end. I don’t have a grinder and I don’t really want one. I’m fine with standard yokel coffee with standard yokel grind. Get your water to boiling. I would let it sit for about 10–20 seconds off the boil in order to get it down to 205–210 degrees. If you can get to-order 200 degree water, that’s ideal. Pour the water in the Finum in your cup just shy of the brim (most coffee will wetten and then start to bubble and float, bring that wet ground coffee almost up to the brim but do not try to agitate it to help it along, that will ruin your cup of coffee) and set your timer for 4 minutes exactly. You may catch what smells like burning coffee, whatever you do, don’t freak out. It’s not really burning. When the timer goes off, pull the Finum out and rest it on it’s lid. Set your timer for 11 minutes 30 seconds and then add whatever sweetener you like. I prefer, again, two packets of Splenda. You will notice that the final brew has an oil-slick on the surface and the rim of your cup will look filthy. That’s an unavoidable consequence of brewing the coffee directly without the paper filter. The paper filter strips out a LOT of really great tasting compounds. After you have brewed a cup of Coffee, you have to toss the contents, there is no Gong-Fu with Coffee. Once it’s done, it’s plant food. The only thing left after a brewing is tannins, acids, and the chemical nasty that you don’t ever want to drink. Plants love it, you’re all done with it. The really handy thing with preparing coffee this way is you need nothing more than what you already have for tea and the Finum is made of non-reactive stainless steel so you can brew for your entire life and there isn’t any crosstalk between tea or coffee assuming you clean the Finum out well. Another nice part is you only brew the coffee cup-by-cup. This way, you get the convenience of a Keurig machine without the expense and the wasted plastic cup. The only waste from the design I use is the grounds or exhausted leaves and those are plant food, so nothing is really wasted.
Anyone should be able to get started for less than $50 depending on your tastes. The kettle is $12 ish, the Finum is about $12, the scale is $10, and the glasses are $25. That comes out to $59. If you have your own cups or mugs, you can slash that down. If you have a kitchen scale you can slash it further. I like the handy little gram scale there because it’s easy to toss in my backpack for when I go to work. The durable parts are just that, they should last a very long time. The Finum, if you take care of it, should last forever. The scale will eat batteries and the kettle might be lost if you are really mean and rough with it. One thing to note about the kettle, and all kettles are that if you decide to go with tap water, you’ll eventually scale up your kettle and either have to clean it somehow, scrape it down somehow, or replace it. If you pass your water thru a Brita or Pur filter (or in the case of my workplace, a reverse-osmosis undersink filter) then you won’t ever have to worry about that.
For your investment, and of course the looseleaf teas from Chocolatea or the coffee from Deathwish, You’ll get to enjoy some of the best tasting hot beverages possible. There are so many blends at Chocolatea it’s dizzying. Plus you’ll be patronizing American businesses. Chocolatea is in Portage, Michigan and Deathwish is out of Saratoga Springs, New York. I find that I love tea made this way, and Coffee? I actually like drinking it this way more than percolated or brewed in an expensive coffeemaker. There is something special about brewing coffee like tea, it seems more direct and honest somehow. I know that there are a lot more flavors and essential oils in the coffee that I brew this way, where coffee that passes through a paper filter loses a lot of it’s subtler features. I could also swear that standard coffee loses some of it’s caffeine. The stuff I make seems to have more punch to it.
If you don’t find what you are looking for on the Chocolatea online store just let me know and I can get it myself and ship it to you personally. Of course that offer really is meant for family, but I could be bought for the right price. If you are reading this and you are in Southwest Michigan, you owe it to yourself to visit Chocolatea in Portage. Everything they do is excellent, they are fair, kind, and pleasant to do business with.
If you decide to follow any of this, I would love it if you would leave a comment letting other people know how you got along with these ideas. Did they work for you? If you try it and you don’t like it, the only thing you might not be able to use is the Finum, everything else can be pressed into service doing other things.
Good luck and enjoy the tea and coffee!