Taiwan Tea Guy

No, I don’t mean lemon and black pepper! New pots need to be cleaned thoroughly before use to remove residuals from the firing process, clean out the pores, and prepare the clay for infusing tea. There are many ways to do this; here I’ll introduce one method that has worked well for me, and is pretty easy to do.

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).

We call prepping a pot for use ‘seasoning’ because we use the type of tea we plan to brew in it as part of the process. If you buy a pot for brewing lighter oolongs/baojong (like this one), you’ll want to season it with that type of tea. You don’t need to dedicate a pot to a specific tea unless you’re an extreme hard-core tea geek (hooray if you are!), but it’s good to keep within certain ranges. While there are different schools of thought regarding tea classification, for general use there are 4 types to consider:

Un-oxidized teas: green, white, yellow

Partly oxidized teas: Baojong, oolong, Tie Kuan Yin

Completely oxidized teas: Black tea

‘After’ oxidized teas: Puer (means processed, then oxidized {read: aged} )

The first step is to get a pot full of water and put the teapot (lid off) inside. The water should cover the teapot by 1/2 inch or so. Turn on the heat, and add a small amount of tea leaf. For this part, I am using an Ali Shan oolong, because my friend plans to brew High Mt. tea with this pot. Don’t forget to put the lid in the pot as well (this one is attached with a cord, so no problem there!

Slowly bring the  water to a rolling boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 20-30 minutes (stirring occasionally, naturally!). Remove the pot CAREFULLY from the water (try to drain out as much water as you can) and allow it to air dry.

Rinse it with hot water, and let it air dry for 5-6 hours with the top off (overnight is good). Then it’s ready to use. As an additional step, you can brew the first pot of tea as you normally do (3-4 rounds is usually enough), but throw out all of the tea. Then you can start drinking from the second pot.

And there you go! All set! The tea in the background is a medium-roast oolong I was drinking while preparing the pot.

Some people have expressed concern that the boiling action may damage the pot, but I’ve never seen that happen. If you put the pot in cold water first and then bring it up to temperature, is should be fine. You can also follow the same procedure for clay pitchers and cups as well – just don’t put too many pieces in at the same time. Also, the amount of tea shouldn’t be too much – you’re steeping it for 1/2 an hour, not 30 seconds, so don’t waste your leaf! about 1/2 what you would normally use in the pot will be adequate – or about 1 tbs depending on the type of leaf.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 1:25 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.