Taiwan Tea Guy

I brought my New Tea Pot back from Miaoli, and was quite excited to show it off to Aliang. He felt I got a good deal on it, but noticed a strange smell, which he guessed to be from brewing pu-er tea in the pot. He suggested I give it a thorough cleaning before putting it to use on my oolongs and Tie Kuan Yins. We discussed different ways of doing this, and I finally decided to try a new method that Aliang has been experimenting with.

Because clay pots are porous, they absorb odors from tea over repeated use. Legend has it that, if a pot is properly raised, eventually you can pour hot water into it, wait a few minutes, and pour out a delicious cup of tea! For serious tea drinkers this means different teas require different pots, and makes an excellent excuse for collecting teaware. I’ll spend more time detailing the selection and matching of teas & teaware in a future post, as it can get complicated quickly. Unfortunately, it also means that if a pot has been used for heavily roasted teas, it can ruin the flavor of a green tea or lighter oolong. Depending on one’s drinking habits, you can generally get by with a pot for each category of tea you drink – for example, a pot for pu-er, another for oolongs, and one for green teas.

The first step in cleaning out my teapot was to soak it several times in hot water to open up the pores and begin the purging process. While the clay was hot, I used an old toothbrush and a soft scrubbing pad (it’s even labelled ‘safe for teaware use’ on the package) to gently scrub the outer and inner surfaces. You can see some of the larger particles that came out in this picture. The water also had a slight tint to it, but it’s not so clear in the photo.

The next step is to soak the pot for a week. Aliang was worried I’d find this step to be a bit disgusting, but considering my upbringing, hey – it’s just water, right? For this, we put the pot into our toilet tank. The flushing action will change the water regularly, so I won’t need to worry about constantly changing the water manually.

I also added a piece of charcoal (NOT Kingsford – there’s a specific type we buy for filtering water) to the pot to help clean the water & odors out, and several pieces to the tank to purify that water as well (you can see the charcoal in this picture, floating around like kids in the pool -no make that logs in the . . .  on second thought, let’s not go there!).

Each week I’ll take the pot out and clean it again, repeating for several weeks until the odors are removed and the pot is ready for use. This could take 5 – 7 weeks to complete. I’ll add a post and evaluation at each step of the process.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 28th, 2008 at 8:14 pm and is filed under My Tea Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.