Where to start with tea-ware?

Let me start by saying my work life and home life are polar opposites when it comes to tea. At Q Haute we brew our tea in a wine carafe, and strain it into another to stop the brewing process. They are made from glass, give no flavour, you can see everything brewing, enjoy the color, enjoy the aroma, they’re inexpensive, relatively easy to clean, they lose heat quickly. We encourage them to pour each others tea by using small cups; and during their time drinking tea with us, they will likely go through 2 or 3 infusions of the leaf, maybe more. The whole process is very hands on, and when I’m at home, that’s what I want to do the least. Give me a big cup and leave me alone with it. My bedroom is the coldest room in our house, hopefully the tea can keep my hands warm.

You can boil water on the stove in a cooking pot, infuse the tea in a glass coffee pot, and pour it out into a tea cup through a strainer. I do this every year when we go to Japan, because somehow my family there doesn’t have a tea pot. There are reasons not to do this, but not many. Mostly it’s a pain in the ass. You could drink out of a mixing bowl, I’ve drank tea out of a mixing bowl but the temperature of the water transfers quickly into the metal and you might have a hard time to put it against your lips; or even hold it. As uncomfortable as it is, for someone with nothing, you can… but why would you? If I’m at home drinking tea alone or with my wife (usually the case), fuck the mass produced Sysco wine carafes, and bring on the clay products that make the experience so much more visual, tactile, and personal.

I don’t think most people who will read this article fall into the ‘I drink tea from a mixing bowl because I have nothing else’ group, but there comes to be a point in some tea drinkers lives that having a nice tea pot or cup is important to them. Tea is a very traditional thing, and each aspect of it has been thought of and improved on over hundreds of years. I’m no master, but from what I have observed so far, I’ll share what I can.

If you are considering starting to collect tea ware, I recommend you start with a cup.

In my opinion, the cup is much more involved in the tea consuming process than any other tool. How it feels against your lips, in your hands, its size, texture, weight, colour and material are all important factors; and it’s these features which make it reasonable to choose one over another.

Size:
How do you drink your tea? Smaller cups cool down much faster, and encourage more participation in service. It’s nice when you’re with someone else to fill their cup, so if you sit down with company to drink tea, I’d probably recommend you start with buying a few small cups. At Q Haute our cups hold 80ml, practically a big mouthful. Drinking tea alone, I think a cup to hold 200ml is great; my favorite cup has a 200ml practical capacity*. They don’t become empty fast enough to be a hassle, and I think it’s easy to find a teapot or gaiwan are around that capacity too, so you don’t have to worry about over steeping, pouring out waste, etc (which we will touch on at the end of the article)  If I am alone, sitting down with a tea literally tunnel visioning on its flavors and doing nothing else; a pot which I make at work is 330ml and will last me about 20 minutes.

*practical capacity meaning I don’t normally fill a cup to the brim — I fill it to its practical capacity, a level where I can actually carry it somewhere without scalding hot tea spilling on my carpet or fingers. Tea cups measurements are typically to their maximum capacity, which is a ridiculous measurement to have.

Texture, weight:
How it feels to hold a cup is nice when you have the time to appreciate it. How it feels against your lips is always noticeable and is one of a cups most special features. Earthenware and Stoneware have a texture that is almost alien to me. I didn’t grow up drinking out of that material, and probably first encountered it when I was 25? Very memorable, very enjoyable each and every time. The material dictates heat transfer. Stoneware and earthenware get very hot, and both hold the heat in longer than other materials. Un-glazed varieties transfer the heat through to your hands which is a nice feature in the cold months. while glazed versions insulate it and protect your hands from it to a certain degree. Temperature swings quickly in glass, porcelain, and metal. Porcelain is smooth like glass, I guess it’s nothing special in texture, they are definitely very pretty looking, and absolutely unforgiving when it comes to fragility. Metals show the heat transfer issue the most, so drinking high temperature teas is sadomasochistic. At Q Haute we use very fragile insulated glass cups #breakagefee

Porosity:
Earthenware that has not been glazed is full of tiny pores that tea soaks into over prolonged use. The cup will eventually inherit a flavor, and then even drinking hot water from it will provide it a signature twist. It’s a really romantic idea to me. It’s hard to recommend this to someone starting out though, because you need to have the mindset of “this is my phoenix oolong tea cup, I will only drink phoenix oolong tea in this cup” and then of course you’ll need multiple cups if you drink different types of tea. That’s the great side of earthenware though, the bad side is that if you’re not careful those pores can fill with bacteria, especially if you drink the tea with milk or sugar, or have poor habits for cleanliness. Most of the time you don’t put milk or sugar in those cups anyway, and the idea is that you rinse them with water when you’re finished using them and let them air dry afterwards. Having to wash that cup with soap is a last resort and will undo a lot of hard work and time you’ve put in building that layer of flavor. In humid climates, even if the cup was left clean in the cupboard, mildew can start to infiltrate the pores and make the cup smell funky. Porcelain, glass, stoneware, metal are not porous, and that’s not a factor.

Colour:
Some tea is really beautiful to look at. Cooked Pu’Erh with their shades of pink, Gyokuro with its aquamarine blues, and even Earl Gray with its mysterious twilight green. This is an aspect of tea which is easily overlooked, and I feel it’s a shame. It’s a wasted opportunity (to me) to drink something as special as Gyokuro out of dark cups because I like the color so much. Colour is is one factor where glass or porcelain is preferable to the others. Colour is not important to everyone, so to each their own.

All that being said, of course it will come down to personal preference, but lets reiterate some points. In a situation to enjoy tea with others, I think smaller cups are better, because it encourages more interaction between the people involved. How you like to brew the tea when you’re alone is of course up to you, but from my point of view, I like to brew one modestly large amount and get on with my day rather than several small brews.

Hopefully that covers cups, but how about teapots?

Consider my point of view. I measure my tea with a scale and use a particular ratio of tea leaf : water : time, you could consider it a recipe. I think its enough work to measure the tea and time, I’d rather not have to measure the water too. I would like to easily and consistently fill my teapot with enough water to create this recipe. How do I do that? I buy a teapot that holds a specific amount of liquid, and measure the tea accordingly. What happens if the amount of tea I have made doesn’t fit in my cup? Do I pour it out? Let it sit and ruin my next batch of tea? Pour it into… another cup? (I give it to my wife or daughter, but what would you do!?)

It’s an easily avoided problem if you have a tea cup big enough to fit your pot, or a pot small enough to fit your tea cup. You can buy a bigger pot and add less water, but then you have to measure. However! there are ways to consistently and easily measure amounts without having to measure each time, but it requires commitment to memory or writing down a chart that explains how much your pot holds at different key points inside. I usually use the interior filter for reference, and could note the bottom of the filter as 110ml, middle of the filter as 140ml, while the top of the filter is 170ml. Effectively giving me 3 pots in 1! It’s work that does pay off when you need it to.

All that being said, I think the single most important factor of the teapot is the size, and how well it cooperates with the rest of your tea ware, and the goal of your tea experience, whether it’s for solo or group use. After that, how does it look? It’s something that you will use every time you make tea, so it should at least be attractive to you. How it feels, the color of it, it’s all personal. There is the aspect of the flavor that the teapot can give in the case of earthenware that I mentioned in the earlier point of porosity. Most of all, the skill of the craftsman drives the price, as people deemed to be at the highest level are known worldwide, and a modern cup or tea bowl can easily sell for thousands of dollars in minutes after release. All of these factors make up the cost of the product, and those prices are sometimes truly insane and hard to justify. That’s art though, and I’d say if you’ve got the money for it and see one you really like — yolo. Let art enrich your life.