Nearly every guide gives the same answer: one teaspoon, or about 2g, per cup. That is a fine starting point for a dense black tea and quite misleading for whole botanicals, because a teaspoon of dried rose buds and a teaspoon of cut pandan do not weigh remotely the same.
The general rule
2–3g per 250ml cup. That holds across everything we sell. What changes is what 2–3g looks like in a spoon.
What that looks like without scales
- Whole flowers (rose buds, chrysanthemum, butterfly pea) — bulky and very light. Think a generous heaped tablespoon, or 5–8 rose buds. It will look like far too much. It is not.
- Cut leaf (pandan, lemongrass, peppermint) — light and fluffy. A heaped teaspoon to a scant tablespoon.
- Dense pieces (dried bael fruit) — heavy. A level teaspoon is often enough; 2–3 slices makes a pot.
- Stevia leaf — ignore all of the above. A pinch, 1–2 leaves. It is a seasoning, not a tea.
The useful trick: weigh it once. Put a cup’s worth on a kitchen scale a single time, look at it in the spoon, and you will recognise it by eye forever after. This is more reliable than any conversion table, because leaf cut varies between harvests.
Why “one teaspoon” fails for flowers
It is a volume measure being used for something sold by weight. Whole dried flowers are mostly air — a jar of rose buds might be a tenth the density of the same jar filled with ground tea. Follow the teaspoon rule with whole flowers and you will consistently make weak, disappointing tea and conclude the tea is poor.
This is also why buying by weight is worth understanding. A 50g bag of dense bael fruit and a 50g bag of butterfly pea flowers look completely different on a shelf, but they will make a broadly similar number of cups.
How many cups is a bag?
At roughly 2.5g per cup:
- 20g — about 8 cups
- 50g — about 20 cups
- 100g — about 40 cups
- 250g — about 100 cups
- 500g — about 200 cups
Each product page shows this estimate against every size, so you are not doing arithmetic at checkout.
If it tastes wrong
Weak? Add leaf, not time. Steeping a thin brew for longer mostly makes it taste stewed rather than stronger.
Harsh? With most flowers that is unusual — they have very little tannin. With lemongrass it is common and almost always a brewing fault; there is a separate piece on that.