A Tea Addict's Journal

I’ve finally started to drink tea more regularly again (instead of sipping large cups of black using a big pot). I tried the same tea two days in a row, something I don’t normally do, and used two different pots for it. The tea in question is my “wet stored” tieguanyin from Taiwan. The pots are, respectively, a zhuni pot I bought from Taiwan, and a zisha pot I got from Japan (the one with the funny lid). I thought of it as a bit of an experiment — how different clays change a tea.

And change it did. All other things being equal, the tea brewed in the zhuni is a little more aggressive, wihle the zisha one (especially since this pot is relatively low density) is, I think, softer. I’m not sure if softer is necessarily a good thing, and I think that should I be making, say, a “dry stored” aged oolong, the softness might take too much away from the tea. For this “wet stored” tea however, it works just fine — gets rid of some of the pungent flavours.

I tend to think it’s better, in general, to use a lower density pot for teas that have more “mixed” flavours, or possibly unpleasant aspects — say, a young puerh that is bitter or a wet stored tea. For teas that are high in aroma though, a zhuni will probably serve better — helps concentrate the aromatics without taking too much away.

Of course there’s the possibiliy that all this is just placebo — and there’s really no way for me to know if that’s the case. Oh well, let’s just pretend there is 🙂