«
»

Pot Cleaning Part II

After letting my new teapot soak for a week in the toilet tank (see Pot Cleaning Part I), I took it out for inspection and a good scrubbing. I found a very soft scrub pad (Scotchgard brand) that touts itself (in Chinese) as ‘safe for teacups’, so I’m giving it a go. So far it’s working very well. I start my cleaning by rinsing the pot several times in hot water. Then I fill it with hot water and let it set until the water is just warm (5-10 minutes), and then repeat several times. The hot water helps open the pores of the clay (just like skin), making it easier for odors to escape.

 

The second phase is to scrub the pot gently inside and out with the scrubbing pad and a mixture of toothpaste powder and warm water. I’m using a Chinese brand, but it’s much the same as denture cleaning powders used in western countries.

 

After the scrubbing, I rinse the pot again several more times, then put it back in the toilet tank for another week. With this pot, I repeated the procedure 3 times over 4 weeks, and am now using the pot as a replacement for the one in my travel set that got broken a couple of months ago.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 16th, 2008 at 1:08 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.

2 Responses to “Pot Cleaning Part II”

  1. March 12th, 2009 at 1:26 pm

    Taiwan Tea Guy » Blog Archive » Teapot Seasoning Says:

    [...] I recently sold a new pot to a good friend of mine in the US, and when he asked me to season the pot for him before shipping, I jumped at the chance to share the process here on my site. You can see more photos of the pot HERE. Keep in mind that this is a new pot, and so needs a bit more attention than a used pot would. If you have a used pot and are planning to continue brewing a similar tea in it, then a couple of good rinsings with hot water should be sufficient; if you want to ‘re-season’ a pot for use with a different type of tea, you might want to check out my posts on Pot Cleaning (Part I and Part II). [...]

  2. July 15th, 2009 at 5:11 am

    Jason Witt Says:

    Thanks for a great article. I never before knew this could be done. I’m not going to put my Yi Xing mugs in the toilet because I have to use it. But I will consider cleaning them out to switch to different kinds of teas for some of them. This is very informative.

Leave a Reply