“How to make good tea” by RobertM

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Recorded12 Apr 2026

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If you're starting from a baseline of drinking relatively cheap mass-market teabags, the easiest way to marginally improve your tea quality is by making sure you don't oversteep it. If it's a typical black tea, try 3 minutes (rather than 4-5). If it's some kind of green, try 2 minutes, and you also have a second very easy marginal improvement: use colder water. Most greens should be brewed at 175F/80C. If you don't have an adjustable-temperature tea kettle, you can get pretty close by pouring boiling water into a mug and then waiting 2-3 minutes. But let's say you actually want to drink good tea, rather than marginal improvements on bad tea. This post will only be covering western style brewing, which is the brewing style familiar to most westerners: one long steep, 300-400ml of water, 2-3g of tea. Equipment Your hard requirements are high-quality loose leaf tea, a tea scale with precision to at least 0.1 grams, and an infuser. (If you're brewing for other people, rather than just yourself, you also want a tea pot with its own infuser.) You don't want to be eyeballing quantities of loose leaf tea without a bunch of practice, and you [...] The original text contained 13 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 11th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d4SNYCop34nX2o6ay/how-to-make-good-tea --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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