A notebook kept at one kitchen table
Tea is mostly water, and almost everything I got wrong for two years was a number I never wrote down.
Tea notes kept at home in Ghent since 2021: water hardness, steeping temperatures, weighing and blending small batches, and how leaf keeps through a Flemish winter.
Last amended 23 February 2026 · February was a month of weighing rather than drinking.
What this table works to
- Leaf to water
- 3 g to 200 ml
- Water
- Filtered, stood overnight
- Temperature taken
- In the cup, not the kettle
- Kitchen in winter
- 19 °C, about 70 % damp
- Scale
- Reads to 0.01 g, tared each time
- Lines in the notebook
- Roughly 1,100 and counting
Cups
Four long entries so far, each one built out of repeated sessions rather than a single afternoon. Where a result did not survive being repeated on another day, it is still here with a line saying so.
19 Aug 2025 · Storage
Storing leaf through a damp Flemish winter
A ground floor flat that sits near seventy percent humidity from November to February, the jar of spring green that went flat in it, and what actually keeps air and damp out.
26 Nov 2024 · Blending
Blending by weight on a scale that reads to a hundredth
Spoons made my blends irreproducible. Building sixty gram batches by percentage, the way a cheap precision scale misbehaves, and the batch I overdosed with dried peel.
11 Feb 2024 · Method
Keeping an honest log of steep times and temperatures
My kettle reads one thing and the cup is another. Measured cooling curves in a nineteen degree kitchen, and why my second steeps were always disappointing.
21 May 2023 · Water
What the water out of my tap does to green tea
Ghent water is harder than I realised. Six weeks of brewing the same leaf with tap, filtered and very low mineral water, and which differences turned out to be real.
Four rules, learned the slow way
- Write the grams and the degrees down before tasting.
- Two cups side by side, or the comparison is imaginary.
- Repeat anything surprising on a different day.
- One variable changes per session. Only one.
I make and blend tea at a kitchen table in Ghent and write down the weights, the temperatures and the times, so that when a cup is unusually good I have some chance of repeating it.