How Long to Steep Tea: Times and Temperatures for Every Type

Tea	Water	Time	Leaf per 250 ml	Notes
Green (Chinese)	75–80 °C	2–3 min	2–3 g	Longjing, gunpowder; cooler water for tender spring leaf
Green (Japanese)	70–75 °C	1–2 min	3–4 g	Sencha; gyokuro goes lower still, 50–60 °C
White	80–85 °C	3–5 min	3–4 g	Silver needle tolerates longer steeps than most
Oolong	85–95 °C	3–4 min	3–4 g	Greener oolongs toward 85 °C; roasted ones toward 95 °C
Black	95–100 °C	3–5 min	2–3 g	Assam and breakfast blends 4–5 min; Darjeeling 3 min
Turkish çay	Just below a simmer, in a double teapot	15–20 min	1 heaped tsp per glass	Concentrate, diluted with hot water to taste
Herbal (tisanes)	100 °C	5–10 min	1–2 tsp	Chamomile, mint, rooibos: hard to over-steep
Matcha	70–80 °C	Whisked, no steep	1–2 g in 70 ml	The whole leaf is drunk, not strained
Cold brew	Cold, in the fridge	6–12 h	4–5 g per 500 ml	Green 6–8 h, black 8–12 h

These are starting points, not laws. Loose leaf usually needs slightly longer than tea bags, because whole leaves release their flavour more slowly and evenly than the fine cut used in bags; a standard bag of black tea is often at its best after 2 to 3 minutes. The tea timer has presets for each type and an alert you can hear from the next room, which addresses the real problem: most tea is forgotten, not mis-timed.

Tea leaves contain three groups of compounds that matter for taste, and they leave the leaf at different rates. Amino acids, chiefly L-theanine, give the brothy, sweet, savoury quality prized in green and white tea. They dissolve readily even in cool water and are mostly out within the first minute or two. Caffeine extracts quickly as well, with much of it in the cup within two to three minutes. Polyphenols, the catechins in green tea and the theaflavins and thearubigins in black tea, loosely grouped as tannins, are what give tea its astringency and bitterness. Their extraction rises steeply with both temperature and time.

So the shape of every steep is fixed: sweetness and body arrive first, bitterness builds afterwards and keeps building. A green tea at 95 °C for five minutes is not "stronger" in any useful sense; it has the same amino acids as a two-minute cup plus a great deal more tannin. Cooler water slows the polyphenols far more than it slows the amino acids, which is why delicate teas are steeped cool, and why black tea, whose flavour depends on those very polyphenols, is brewed with water at a full boil.

Milk works the other way round. The proteins in milk bind to tannins and blunt astringency, which is why a strong breakfast tea takes milk well and why nobody adds it to a Darjeeling.

Without a thermometer or a variable-temperature kettle, there are two reliable tricks. The first is to mix boiling water with room-temperature water: four parts boiling to one part cold gives about 84 °C, three to one gives 80 °C, and two to one gives roughly 73 °C. The second is simply to wait. Water off the boil drops to about 90 °C within a minute or two, to around 80 °C after three to five minutes and to roughly 70 °C after six to ten minutes, depending on how much water there is and whether the lid is on. Set a timer for the cooling as well as for the steep and you will land in the range every time.

Water quality matters more than most people expect. Very hard water forms a film on the surface of black tea as calcium reacts with polyphenols, and it flattens the flavour of green tea; heavily chlorinated water gives a faint swimming-pool note. Distilled water goes too far the other way and tastes empty. Filtered tap water, or a bottled water with moderate mineral content, is the sweet spot. Use freshly drawn water rather than water that has been sitting in the kettle since the morning, mostly because it will taste cleaner.

Turkish çay is brewed as a concentrate. Loose black tea, usually from the Rize region, goes into the small upper pot of a çaydanlık while the lower pot boils. Boiling water from the lower pot is poured over the leaves, and the upper pot then sits on top, kept just below a simmer, for 15 to 20 minutes. The result is far too strong to drink on its own; it is poured into a tulip glass and diluted with hot water from the lower pot, roughly a third concentrate for açık (light) or half for koyu (dark). The long, gentle heat extracts everything, tannins included, which is why the dilution and the sugar are part of the method rather than an afterthought.

Matcha is not steeped at all. The leaf is ground to a powder, whisked into 70 to 80 °C water and drunk whole. There is nothing to over-extract, but there is also no filtering, so you consume all of the caffeine and all of the tannin in those two grams of leaf. Water that is too hot makes it taste harsh and foam poorly.

Cold brew exploits the temperature dependence of extraction. In cold water the amino acids and aromatics come out over hours while the polyphenols barely move, so even a black tea left overnight in the fridge comes out sweet and smooth, with less caffeine than the same leaf brewed hot. Use about double the leaf, keep it refrigerated rather than on the counter, and strain after 6 to 12 hours.

Whole-leaf teas are made for more than one infusion. A good oolong, white or Chinese green will give three or four cups from the same leaves, and many people find the second infusion the best, because the leaves have opened and the harsher compounds from the first pour are gone. Add 30 to 60 seconds to each successive steep to compensate for the gradual depletion; a 2-minute first steep becomes 2½ minutes, then 3, then 4. Gongfu-style brewing takes this to its extreme, with a large quantity of leaf in a tiny pot and infusions of 15 to 45 seconds, repeated ten times or more.

Tea bags and the fine-cut black tea used in breakfast blends are mostly spent after one steep. They can be re-used for a weaker second cup, but do not expect much. Leaves that have sat wet for more than a few hours should be discarded rather than re-brewed.

Drink, 250 ml	Typical caffeine
Black tea, 3–5 min	40–70 mg
Oolong	30–50 mg
Green tea	20–45 mg
White tea	15–35 mg
Matcha (2 g)	35–70 mg
Cold brew (12 h)	Roughly half the hot-brewed figure for the same leaf
Herbal tisanes	0 mg (except yerba mate and guayusa, which are not tea)
Filter coffee, for comparison	90–120 mg

The type of tea is a weaker predictor of caffeine than people assume. All true tea comes from the same plant, and the caffeine in a cup depends on the amount of leaf, the water temperature and the steeping time at least as much as on whether the leaf was oxidised into black or left green. A green tea brewed hot for five minutes can carry more caffeine than a lightly brewed black. The popular trick of steeping for 30 seconds, pouring off the water and re-steeping to "decaffeinate" the cup removes only a modest share of the caffeine and a good deal of the flavour, so it is not worth the sacrifice. If caffeine is the concern, a shorter steep, a cooler steep, a later infusion of the same leaves or a herbal tisane all work better.

If you are timing the pot and the pan at the same time, the cooking timer runs several countdowns at once, and the egg timer with the egg guide covers the other kitchen question that comes down to minutes.