The Tea Dial-In Kit

Brew the same good cup on purpose: blend your water to the tea, weigh your own teaspoon, set the temperature your kitchen can reach, change one thing per cup, and know when gongfu and a second steep pay

LeafSteep's free calculators each answer one question well, and leave the next one open. The Water Hardness Calculator tells very hard water to blend with low-mineral water, but never says how much. The Tea-to-Water Ratio Calculator gives the right grams for your cup, then turns them into teaspoons at 2 g a spoon for every tea, though its own notes say rolled oolong packs far more leaf into a spoon than fluffy white tea. The Tea Dial-In Kit joins them up. In the worked example, a 3.5 g spoon of rolled oolong makes the calculator's 1.5 teaspoons 5.25 g against a 3 g dose, 75% over, which at two mugs a day is $328.50 of leaf a year; 210 ppm tap water blended with a 20 ppm bottled water needs 210 ml of tap a liter for green tea and 520 ml for oolong, saving $54.75 a year against all bottled. Seven steps cover your water number and blend, a weighed spoon, the temperature cap at your altitude, a one-change-per-cup dial-in, the infusion where a gongfu session starts saving leaf, and the price of a cup. Every figure is computed from our own calculators, and the worked numbers are examples, tagged as such. It is a brewing kit: no health claims about tea or tisanes, nothing about water and health, no minerals added to water, and no caffeine estimate. Included: 24 printable pages with a water sheet, a spoon card, a dial-in log, recipe cards, a reference table and a quickstart, plus a personalised sheet worked from the numbers you enter in the ratio, hardness, steep-time and gongfu calculators.

Look inside

Two full pages from the kit, exactly as printed. Click either to read it at full size before you decide.

What is in it

• The Water First Rule: your water's hardness in ppm, German degrees and grains per gallon, and a target for each tea
• The Blend-Down Rule: how much tap and how much low-mineral bottled water per liter, and what a year of it costs
• The One-Spoon Weigh-In Rule: the calculator's teaspoons against your own weighed spoon, and what the difference does to a dose
• The Altitude Cap Rule: each tea's temperature range at your altitude, and which teas lose it to the boil
• The One-Change Rule: a first cup in the middle of the window and one change per cup until two good cups in a row
• The Break-Even Infusion Rule: when a gongfu session starts using less leaf than a Western mug or a pot steeped twice
• The Price-the-Cup Rule: cost per cup at your dose, steeped twice and gongfu, and whole packs for a month
• Four working pages: a water sheet, a spoon card, a dial-in log and recipe cards
• A reference table of grams for five cup sizes and three gongfu vessels, boiling points by altitude, the formulas and a quickstart
• A personalised sheet worked from the figures you enter in the ratio, water hardness, steep-time and gongfu calculators

The kit picks up where the free Tea-to-Water Ratio Calculator leaves off. The calculator gives the right grams for your cup, then converts them to teaspoons at one spoon weight for every tea; the kit has you weigh your own spoon once. It uses the Water Hardness Calculator to blend your water down to each tea, the Steep Time & Temperature Calculator for the temperature your kitchen can reach, and the Gongfu Brew Timer to find when a session pays. It is about brewing only: it makes no health claims about tea, and it does not estimate caffeine.