The Confusion with Infusions?

All of our tea packaging labels contain guidelines on how to brew the tea. Each tea type has a slightly different set of instructions to ensure you taste the best possible version of your tea. Each tea type tastes better under different steeping conditions since some types are more delicate and others more robust and therefore requiring longer steeping times or higher temperatures.

If you are the kind of person to read the instructions ;) you might notice something at the end of the instructions that mentions the number of infusions. I've had several customers ask what exactly an infusion is, so let's clear the air to make sure you can get the most out of your loose-leaf tea.

The joy of loose-leaf tea compared to teabags is that you can steep it several times. So an "infusion" is really communicating the "number of times you can reuse the leaves".

So let's say you purchase a 30g bag of loose-leaf tea and the brewing instructions are:

2g of tea, 250mL water, 90degC, 3 minutes, and 3 infusions.

This means you can take 2g of tea leaves, add 250mL of water at 90degC and steep it for 3 minutes, 3 times. So you could get a total of 250mL x 3 = 750 mL of tea from the same 2g of tea leaves! This is one of the joys of loose-leaf teas! The flavour profile would vary slightly with each infusion and you'd have the opportunity to taste different notes of the tea as they are extracted in each infusion. Not to mention being able to drink tea throughout the day :)