I stumbled across How to Make Tea in my quest to find the perfect tea handbook for beginners like me[1]. The subtitle “The Science Behind the Leaf” intrigued me so I decided to give it a go.

This little book is organised into six sections:

1. The Tea Plant: Containing the obligatory history of tea [2] and then the more fascinating section on the botany of tea, how it’s grown and harvested, and how it’s processed. The botany of tea was something new to me and I really enjoyed reading about that. I also found the explanation on how tea was processed to be one of the clearest that I’ve read so far.

2. Tea Chemistry: This is about the chemical components of tea and its health effects. The books I’ve read so far don’t really go into the science behind the tea so I found this to be unique and educational. I also like how the section on the possible medicinal effects was written – unlike a lot of sites on the internet, it doesn’t make tea into a cure-all [3] and if the fact that it refers to at least two meta-studies [4] is any indication, the research done should be trustworthy.

3. Tea & Taste: This was on the types of tea, its descriptors, and some technical terms. I found this to be the weakest part of the book since it didn’t mention yellow tea and put pu-erh in a category of its own. To be fair, a lot of books do this, but pu-erh is technically a dark tea (or 黑茶 in Chinese), not a category of its own.

4. Buying & Storing Tea: This was another educational and practical section. I thought the tea flavour wheel was nice (although I would have liked more instruction on how to use it – it seems fairly intuitive though), and I thought that the tips on what to look for when inspecting the tea to be useful. For example, are the dried tea leaves consistent in shape and size, are there off-odors, etc. It’s stuff that may seem obvious to people more experienced with buying tea, but for a newbie, I think it would be very useful.

5. The Bare Necessities: This was on the equipment needed to make tea, including water. Quite a lot was practical (like the section on temperatures), but I don’t have a lot of the equipment mentioned – like the scales or the thermometer. I just use a pot and kettle, although I am willing to admit that I may be oversimplifying things.

6. How to Make Tea: The last section of the book, this was another practical chapter on how to brew tea using different styles. I like that the gongfu style and gaiwan method were mentioned alongside the English style of brewing tea.

Overall, this seems to be a good, practical guide to tea for beginners. It’s not perfect, but for such a small book, it definitely has a lot of information.

Notes
[1] I also made up that quest two seconds ago but it is totally a real thing now so expect more book reviews!

[2] It seems like every tea book must include a brief history, so the information here is nothing new if you’ve read any tea handbook before.

[3] Those sites make it hard for me to verify claims about tea, annoyingly.

[4] Meta-study: A meta-study is simply an analysis of multiple studies. Since studies can throw out freak results, a meta-study looks at all the different results to determine which of the studies are more accurate. For example, if there are ten studies on the relationship between two things and two show a negative correlation while eight show a positive correlation, then it’s more probable that there is a possible correlation (assuming all ten studies were conducted properly).