Create the Perfect Water for Tea Brewing

Join us on Sunday, January 10, 2020, when we will be joined by Rie Tulali from Tea Curious. 

Rie will be sharing with NYTS members Tea Curious' custom created recipe for the perfect water for tea brewing.

For your convenience, I have gathered up all the ingredients which you will need, except for the distilled water, and will send it out in one package to all who register for this event. The cost will be $20.

The $20 payment includes;

     Calcium Chloride (5gr)

     Sodium Carbonate (5gr)

     Magnesium Sulfate (5gr)

     Potassium Bicarbonate (5gr)

     Alishan Taiwanese Oolong (10 gr)

     Yunnan Dian Hong (10gr)

You will need to supply the following items; 

     Weighing Scale (accurate to 0.001)

     1 Gallon Distilled Water

     Gaiwan

     Fairness Pitcher

     Tasting Cup

     Waste Bowl or Tea Tray

If you prefer to purchase your own ingredients and use your own tea, then be sure to register for the Free Ticket.  

Here are the links to the ingredients you will need;

Sodium Carbonate (Na₂CO₃)

Sodium Carbonate (Na₂CO₃)

Magnesium Sulfate (MgSO₄ * 7H₂O)

Potassium Bicarbonate (KHCO₃)

Weighing Scale Accurate to 0.001

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After 8 years of water study and more than 100+ waters tested — as well as the help of many, many friends and fellow tea nerds — the team at Tea Curios is just over the moon to be able to share the Tea Curious Open Water Recipe with us!

The Tea Curious Open Water recipe is a free, open-source, and super accessible formula for brewing water you can make right at home. The recipe was initially created by Rie Tulali and Steven White, from Tea Curious, as a way to achieve more control and consistency in their brewing process.

They took lots of inspiration from the coffee world to make this recipe, where DIY water formulas have been pretty much mainstream for years. And while you can find tons of awesome, super dialed-in recipes for coffee brewing water online, tea does require slightly different water than coffee does: and so they created the Tea Curious Open Water, made specifically for tea. ;)

To make this water, they used common salts, like Epsom salt and soda ash, that help capture the same mineral composition found in soft spring water — the type of water that tea sage Lu Yu loved the most for tea, and also the type of water that Rie and Steven preferred in their hundreds of experiments as well. :)

All in all, the recipe costs just cents per liter to make, takes just a few minutes to prepare, and can be made with ingredients that are readily available online or at local stores.

This recipe is designed to perform well with the whole spectrum of teas, from white tea to oolong to shou pu'erh, so you can just make the base recipe and stick with it, pretty much forever. :) However, it can also be easily customized to boost flavor, texture, aroma, and/or aftertaste based on your needs and preferences in tea, as we'll discuss below.

Finally, while Rie and Steven relied heavily on textbooks, meticulous experiments, and over 100+ peer-reviewed articles on tea & water to develop this recipe, they are not trained chemists or hydrologists by any means. Instead, what they will share with us is the result of thousands of hours of testing, learning, and on-the-ground study by a couple of professional tea nerds, who simply became water fanatics by necessity. ;)

Rie is the founder of Tea Curious, a friendly online resource and community for serious tea drinkers. A forever student of tea with an admitted bias for oolong and the odd tea experiment, these days Rie works together with her partner-in-crime Steven to help others create a confident and explorative tea practice, sharing 12+ years of tea study through online workshops, courses, tea tours, and live sessions. You can find her work featured in publications like Tea Journey Magazine and Eighty Degrees, along with their site Tea Curious