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.

Steepwell is a notebook that got out of hand. I began it in the spring of 2021, when I was drinking a great deal of tea during a long stretch of working from a flat and could not understand why the same leaf gave me a fine cup one morning and a dull one the next. Writing down the weight and the water temperature answered that in about a fortnight, and then raised five more questions, and I have been chasing those ever since. Everything here is done at an ordinary kitchen table on the ground floor of a brick building in Ghent, with a kettle, a thermometer, a jug filter and a scale that cost less than a good dinner.

I am not in the trade and I have never been trained in any of this. That matters, because it means my palate is unreliable in ways I cannot fully see, and my method is built around that rather than around confidence. I taste things side by side rather than one after another. I write the numbers before I write the impression, because the impression bends to fit the numbers if I do it the other way round. I repeat anything surprising at least twice on different days before I let myself believe it, and when a note here says something is true, it means it held up across those repeats and no more than that.

There is nothing for sale on these pages and I do not name where any of the leaf comes from. Partly that is because a supplier list turns a notebook into a recommendation, which is not what this is; partly because the same name covers wildly different material from one year to the next, so the name would tell you less than the description does. A tea here is a type, a rough harvest period, a leaf appearance and a price bracket I do not mention. The measurements are the part I stand behind.