the simple and finite rules of brewing tea apply everywhere. start at the top and keep going until you think it's too much effort.
i get asked about this a lot, so i'm putting this draft out there. more will be added later.
are there hard water deposits at the bottom of your kettle? almost definitely. that scale makes your kettle run about 10% less efficiently, eventually breaks the kettle, and makes the tea look and taste worse.
load the kettle with a 1:1 white vinegar:water solution, run it, then run the kettle with water twice, and you're good.
the more precise you are, the better the tea will be. if you're using tea bags, you'll always have the same amount of tea; if you use roughly the same cup, you'll always use roughly the same amount of water. at that point, you only have to control water temp and steep time. assuming a 2g tea bag (which seems standard) and 175ml of water, start with these guidelines:
| tea | white | green | wulong | black | pu-erh |
| temp | 80c | 80c | 85c | 100c | 100c |
| time | 5m | 3m | 3m | 4m | 4m |
try timing it—with a real timer—once. you want a baseline for what a good cup looks like. next time, when you see it's gotten to say, the same colour or taste, that's how you know when to pull the tea bag. once you get a feel for it, it's barely any effort for significantly better taste.
also, if you see a cloud of reddy brown seep out of the tea bag when it hits water, that's food colouring. i personally wouldn't use the diffusion of food colouring as a proxy for the diffusion of tea flavour but experimental results should reign.
electric kettles are more efficient than stovetop kettles, so they cost less over time and run faster. if you get 80c water by heating to 100c and letting it rest, or mixing in cold water, you've wasted energy heating that.
when it comes to buying anything, i would strongly recommend only looking at the unit price. a few points emerge:
maccha is 3-10x the price of sencha/gyokuro of a similar quality. the legend that the Hongwu Emperor banned the production of maccha in china because grinding the tea was a colossal waste of labour time—and hence, the emperor was a man of the people—is probably historically false, but worth considering in spirit.
red rose is really, really cheap. if you like it, it's a pretty good value proposition. but when you start getting into the good stuff, and they start selling tea bags with weird geometries, maybe half the price goes to the bag. i've seen—at Williams-Sonoma, temper your expectations—tea got about a 4x markup to be sold in a bag in a pretty package.
loose leaf obviously makes better tea.
i usually refill my existing tea canisters, and i don't use cloth bags or anything, so the only waste is the spent leaves, which is still good compost. so, maybe consider loose leaf.
all "tea" comes from the same plant, camellia sinensis. rooibos, mate, mint and such are not camellia sinensis, and are more "properly" called tisanes than tea.
when a leaf is picked, it starts to wither. you may have seen dry leaves on the ground in autumn? those are fully withered. once withered, the leaves begin to oxidize, which is the same process as the browning of an apple.
black tea is fully oxidized, and green tea is fully unoxidized.
wulong[^1] tea is anywhere in between. because of this—and all the other magical mystery interventions invented over the past thousand years—wulongs have an incredible variety of tastes. this is a real connoisseurs tea.
the other big connoisseur's tea is pu'er. the history and definition of pu'er is contentious: loosely, it means a green tea, from yunnan, that's not fully dried, and thus, allowed to ferment. fermentation creates all kinds of complex, unexpected, beautiful flavours. compare grape juice and wine.
white tea is tea that's undergoes a long, complex, carefully observed withering process, and nothing else. you'll often hear it's fully unoxidized like green tea, but that's false, it's just very mildly oxidized. you should definitely try a nice silver needles, and something aged at least 5 years.
yellow tea is green tea that's "wrapped" or "heaped", which cause chlorophyll to break down and partially oxidization. it tastes interesting, and it's easy on the stomach, but it's hard to get and a bit expensive in the west.
[^1]: oolong means "black dragon" in mandarin. the spelling "oolong" is from an old romanization scheme; in modern pinyin, one writes "wūlóng", hence "wulong". just something i care about personally. (btw, "dào" is the modern romanization of "tao", as in "tao te ching" spelled "dao de jing" in pinyin.) the french call wulong's "blue" teas, and the chinese call black tea "red" tea, and pu'er "black" tea, so you could construct a little rainbow: white green yellow blue red black. whimsical!
there's no correct answer, but for your first, i'd recommend either glass or ceramic.
glass makes it easy to monitor the progression of your brew. you can get a french press or glass beaker with convenient water fill lines from ikea on the cheap. most all glass is dishwasher safe these days. it doesn't insulate as well (unless double walled! but then it isn't dishwasher safe (most of the time)), isn't very traditional, and is extremely breakable.
ceramic is certainly still breakable—as i've learned many times—but usually a bit stronger, and breaks into easier to clean pieces. thick ceramic with a tea cozy is a wonderful insulator. ceramic is cheap and bountiful, and comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes.
if you want me to choose for you, i'd get the ikea french press. please note that plunging a french press stops the brewing in coffee because it breaks the crust, it will not stop your tea from steeping, you will overextract your tea if you don't pour it out. also, the filter is kinda annoying to clean.
when your liquid (called liquor in the business) is sufficiently steeped, you need to get it out of contact with the leaves. if you have a 4 cup pot and 4 people, there's no problem. ditto if you have a 4 cup pot and a comically massive cup. if you have a 2 cup ikea french press and you pour out one cup, the second cup will continue steeping in the french press. if you often find yourself in that scenario, get yourself a ceramic pot with a removable basket, preferably a very big one.
as tea steeps, it rehydrates and expands, about 1-5 times what it was dry (depends on the leaf). if you have one of those skinny stick things, there's a very good chance the leaf won't have the room to expand, and you'll overextract the parts that could expand, and underextract the parts that didn't expand. in the coffee world that's called channeling. you'll get something that's extra bitter, but lacking the body and brightness from the underextracted parts.
the tighter your leaves are packed, the worse it'll be. squeezing tea bags is such a horrid idea because the water that's in there probably hasn't properly exchanged with the rest of the water, and is almost definitely disgustingly over-extracted. you do not want pure tannic bitter water added to rest of your tea. it is not worth it to pwn the libs. you are only hurting yourself.
if you're brewing a whole leaf tea, and your tea pot has course ceramic filter in front of the spout, you might not need the basket at all.
if you've got a whole leaf green tea, you can put that directly in a cup and pour—optimally—80c water over it. after about 3 minutes it should be cool enough to drink. once the water gets halfway down, add more. keep going until you're out of flavour. this is a very normal way of drinking tea in china that's a quite excellent bang for the buck.
give it a rinse after every use, the faster the better. dishwashers aren't very good with tea stains; for whatever reason they need a little scrubbing. if you're in stain city, get some denture cleaners: an overnight soak and a little scrubby the morning after will solve all your problems. many laud lemon juice, but i've little luck with it.
spark notes for now: