We drink a LOT of tea in Turkey. Happy? Let’s drink tea. Sad? Drink tea. Tired? Tea. Relaxed? TEA. I also enjoy brewing tea in the evenings, especially when we have guests. But I was very frustrated with the inconsistency of my tea brewing. One day I decided to apply what I’d learned from brewing coffee to brewing tea.

This is for brewing Turkish-style black tea. I’ve never applied it to other types of tea like rooibos or oolong.

What you need to brew Turkish black tea with my method:

1. Your favorite type of black tea (it can be multiple!)
2. A kitchen scale
3. A stacked teapot

For black tea I use three different types:

1. Earl Grey: I love the bergamot aroma.
2. Ceylon tea: I love its full-bodied taste and tinge of bitterness.
3. Turkish black tea: it has a mild taste compared to the others, but it gives good volume for other aromas to come forward.

I need to think about how much tea I want to yield before starting the process. So let’s say I want to make ~1 liter of tea. For this, I want a yield of 300 grams of black tea concentrate, which I’ll dilute with hot water. It’ll be roughly 30% concentrate and 70% water.

For the concentrate, I add 5 g of black tea leaves for every 100 g of water at the top. I leave the teapot on the heat for 15 minutes. Evaporation removes ~20% of the concentrate, and I need to account for that as well. So to prepare 300 grams of tea concentrate, I need 360 grams of water and 18 grams of tea leaves. The ratios of the tea varieties depend on how much aroma and/or body I want. I usually go with 50% Turkish tea, 30% Earl Grey, and 20% Ceylon – so roughly 9 g Turkish, 6 g Earl Grey, and 3 g Ceylon.

Never, ever, ever, ever pour hot water onto tea leaves! First pour the water into the teapot, and then put the tea leaves into the water.

After 15 minutes of brewing, I should have approximately 300 grams of tea concentrate. By now I’ve immersed the tea in high heat for a significant amount of time and extracted almost all the flavor from it, and I need to remove the leaves from the liquid—otherwise they’ll start releasing unpleasant bitter flavors.

For this I pour the concentrate into a thermos and dilute it with water there. How much to dilute depends on your preference for strength. I usually go for twice the volume of tea—so for 300 grams of concentrate, I add 600 grams of boiling water, yielding 900 grams of drinkable tea.

Enjoy!