Strong Tea with Aeropress

I’ll use Chrysanthemum as an example, which is a popular herbal tea in
East Asia. However, this method
applies to many tea drinks if they use dried tea leaves.

A small rant: authors of recipes, could you please put your recipes right in the beginning of your articles? It makes everybody’s life harder if you do the opposite.

How to make it

  1. Prepraration phase Grind 10 grams of dried Chrysanthemum flowers. Grind size should be quite fine.
  2. (Optional) Rinse the aeropress filter paper, perferably two.
  3. Rinse phase (optional) Use the normal method (as supposed to inversion method) and screw the paper in, tightly.
  4. Pour in the tea grounds.
  5. Add 50-100 grams of cold water. Swirl gently and let it drain. You can press to make the process faster.
  6. Push the plunger all the way down and collect the tea grounds. Rinse and keep the paper filter.
  7. Brew phase Use inversion method, push the plunger at least to the position of 1/4 volume.
  8. Add the rinsed tea grounds in. Pour in 150 grams of hot water (boiling, > 95 celcius). Stir gently and wait for 1 min.
  9. Secure the paper filter with the filter cap. Carefully filp the aeropress onto a cup. Give it a gentle swirl and wait for half a minute.
  10. Gently press the plunger and you have a strong cup of herbal tea.

What you can do with it

You can dilute it with water to your preferred taste and add sweetner of your choice.
Or you can add milk to make yourself a nice cup of milk herbal tea.
Black tea and green tea can also be brewed with this method.

It’s a good way of getting strong tea with good loose tea leaves
instead of crappy or unethically mass-produced tea powder.

Having a nice strong cup of black tea is the key of a good cup of
milk tea. When tea is too weak, people use condensed milk to avoid
further diluting the tea.
However, if we would like some fresh milk or plant-based milk,
it’s better to have a really good cup of strong tea to start with.

Inspirations and credits

Inspired by coffee and milk coffee making.

My coffee brewing techniques mostly come from YouTube. Shout out to James Hoffmann and European Coffee Trip.
They have great YouTube channels and I recommand you to check them out.

Here are two aeropress videos by them.

https://youtu.be/Z9Pa7hxJUfA

https://youtu.be/j6VlT_jUVPc