Three ways to brew Dark tea
Dark tea is the one category where a fourth method belongs on the list: boiling. Steeping is not the only way, and for old cakes it is not the best one.
Gongfu with a small pot is the standard. The Western method is weak. Grandpa style works unusually well, and boiling is traditional.
The reason is compression. Leaf pressed into a cake or brick needs heat and time to open, and three minutes in a pot does not do it.
The dose is also heavier than anywhere else. Eight grams in 200 millilitres is normal, roughly double a green tea ratio.
Choose by what the tea is and how long you have, rather than by habit.
Water quality plays a part as well. Very soft water gives a flat liquor, and moderately mineral water around 100 parts per million suits it.
Gongfu: small pot, high leaf, short pours
Eight grams in 200 millilitres, a full boil, a ten second rinse discarded first, then 20 second steeps.
Add five seconds per round and expect the cake to keep improving through the fifth or sixth steep.
Use a thick walled pot, either clay or ceramic. Heat retention is the whole point, and thin porcelain loses too much between pours.
Keep the vessel hot between steeps. A small warmer, or simply a pot with a lid and a cosy, makes a visible difference.
Judge the tea from the middle of the session. Almost every dark tea is worse at the start than it is at steep four.
Break the cake into chunks rather than dust. Dust clouds the liquor and makes it bitter, and that is a preparation problem rather than a brewing one.
Western: a normal teapot, longer steep
Eight grams in 500 millilitres, boiling water, five minutes, and lift the leaf out. That is the Western version.
It is the weakest of the methods for dark tea, because five minutes is not enough for a compressed cake to open fully.
It works better for loose ripe pu-erh, which is already broken up and extracts more readily.
Use boiling water and keep the pot warm. A cold pot drops the temperature below what this leaf needs.
If the result is thin, the answer is not more time. It is more leaf or a different method.
Give it a longer rinse than you think. Ten seconds on a tightly pressed brick, and the second rinse often still comes out dark.
Grandpa: leaf in the cup
Grandpa style is a genuinely good method for dark tea, which is unusual. Five grams in a 300 millilitre glass, boiling water, top up all day.
It works because dark tea tolerates long extraction. Unlike green or red, it does not turn harsh when it sits.
A thermos is the practical version. Five grams in 500 millilitres of boiling water, left for an hour, and it will carry a morning.
Use a chunk of cake rather than dust, and rinse it first. Dust makes the liquor cloudy and muddy.
This is the cheapest way to drink good dark tea, both in leaf and in attention.
This method also suits a desk better than any other category. A flask in the morning and nothing else to think about until lunch.
Which to choose
For tasting a cake, use gongfu with a thick walled pot and boiling water. Nothing else shows you what the tea is.
For a long morning at a desk, use a thermos. It is the single most practical method in the whole category.
For an old cake, boil it. Five grams in 600 millilitres, simmered gently for 10 minutes, topped up as it reduces.
The Western pot is the weakest option here, and it is worth knowing that before you conclude a cake is poor.
Whatever you choose, rinse the leaf and use a full boil. Those two matter more than the method does.
Old cakes also vary by how they were stored. A dry stored cake needs more steeps to open than a humid one, and expecting both to behave alike disappoints.
If the leaf smells musty or sour after the rinse, trust that. It means the cake was stored badly, and no method will rescue it.