  In this series of two papers we present a high dispersion spectroscopic
analysis of 8 candidate extremely metal poor stars selected from the
Hamburg/ESO Survey and of 6 additional very metal poor stars. We demonstrate
that with suitable vetting using moderate-resolution spectra the yield of this
survey for stars with [Fe/H] $\le -3.0$ dex is very high; three out of the
eight stars observed thus far at high resolution from the HES are actually that
metal poor, three more have [Fe/H] $\le -2.8$ dex, and the remainder are only
slightly more metal rich. In preparation for a large scale effort to mine the
Hamburg/ESO Survey database for such stars about to get underway, we lay out in
this paper the basic principles we intend to use to determine in a uniform way
the stellar parameters Teff, surface grav, and reddening.
