Since I’ve been in Spreadsheet everything mode, I started a spreadsheet documenting my daily tea consumption which I find to be the most helpful tea spreadsheet I’ve created. I found tracking how much tea I drink to be SUPER SUPER helpful in understanding my tea drinking practices, learning about my teas and being more effective with tea purchases.
What my Daily Tea Consumption Spreadsheet tracks
1. Tea per gram each day.
2. How much tea leaves my house (gifted/swapped)
3. How much tea comes in.
4. Running totals of whether my stash is growing or shrinking
Here is a screen shot of my spreadsheet for February and March: (click image to zoom in)
Yes, I weigh all my tea before I steep it, which is really easy to do since I got this handy little gram scale. I use Google Sheets, so I can access my spreadsheet by my phone when I’m on the go. I have a number that is the sum of all the tea I drank and an average per day.
To understand my spreadsheet madness – I documented how much tea I drank by weight of leaf, rather than by cup. I think “how many cups I drink” is not useful of a metric. For one, something like drinking a tea bag or matcha would be about 1 to 2 grams per 175ml to 250ml/ 6 or 8oz cup. As an example for the other direction 5 gram pu’er tea nugget gave me approximately 950ml (32oz) of tea. A black tea blended with nuts weighs 8 grams to produce a single 355ml / 12oz cup of tea. To put the tea numbers together, a day I drink 10 grams of tea could be 1.5 cups to 8 cups of tea (cup as in 250ml/8oz). And really, what is a “cup of tea” numbers people say? I’ve seen steeping instructions say either 6oz, 8oz and even 12oz. If I drink gongfu style a single cup is 30 to 50ml, or 1 to 2 oz. I can go back to the pu’er tea nugget example and say for 10 grams of tea I drank 38 cups of tea a day!
What I learned from tracking my daily tea consumption
From the spreadsheet, I learned I drink a lot of tea, so far over a 1lb a month, about 14 to 19 grams of tea a day. My consumption seems to vary day to day, often spikes when I make a pitcher of iced tea. Days I drink a couple black blends or fruity herbals I can hit 29 grams of tea a day. Days I review teas tend to spike a bit as well, showing a tea blogger has to drink lots of tea! I am curious to see whether my daily tea consumption will change with each season.
What I learned about tracking my teas so far is how much things weigh – like my weighty nutty black teas verses matcha. Say, I know my round of matcha is 2 grams, a 30 gram tin of matcha would last me 15 rounds of tea. A weighty nutty black tea would be like 7, 6oz cups of tea for 30 grams/1oz. (Not the common number thrown around that 1oz of tea should be 10 to 15 cups.)
In regards to tracking how much tea you drink to effectively buy tea, I also track how much tea arrives by weight and compare that to how much I consumed that month. I need to trim down my stash since at this time I have over 500 teas, so seeing that I’ve gained an excess of tea is kind of a bad thing (though, I feel I shouldn’t count pu’er, that’s an investment, at least that’s the line I’ve been lying to myself with.)
Even if you track say for a month, you’ll have an idea of how much tea to purchase that you can consume in a good amount of time before your tea goes stale. I cringe when I hear tea sellers state a size as “A month’s worth of tea.” to upsell. Is it a month worth of tea? Maybe for them, but potentially not for you. With tracking and learning your own tea drinking habits, you’ll actually know what a month of tea is for you.
I know it’s May and I posted previous month as my main example of my spreadsheet, but if you are curious of what my current month looks like, here you go –
I’m over 1kg on tea this month! O_O CRAP!
Customary Tea Owl photo:
