A Tea Addict's Journal

I borrowed the term throatiness from Lew, who was the first person I remember using this particular term. What it is supposed to mean is a sort of feeling in the throat when you drink a tea — some sort of coolness or tingly sensation. This is the kind of thing that usually only puerh has, but some other teas sometimes will have them too. Generally speaking, only good tea will have it and the longer and stronger it is, the better the tea is.

That is until I got my tetsubin. Now, oddly enough, almost all teas give off this sensation. Mind you, better teas still do better with longer/stronger feeling, but instead of just having that feeling once in a while, now I get it all the time, or at least most of the time. Of course, it might have to do with the fact that I’ve upgraded my tea drinking. I didn’t use to imbibe 20 years old oolongs regularly. In Beijing, and to a lesser extent Taipei, I was often drinking stuff that is no good for the sake of learning or experimenting. So obviously there is a bit of a sampling bias there. On the other hand, I have found that with teas that I know well, using the tetsubin will give me a stronger sensation of throatiness.

Is it some sort of chemical reaction, or the extraction/release of certain compounds through the addition of whatever it is that the tetsubin adds? I have no idea what it is, but it’s further proof that one can’t use only one or two criteria to judge a tea’s quality. So much depends on what you use to brew that tea, it is almost impossible to tell for certain what is causing the tea to taste a particular way.

On this recent trip to Boston I made tea twice at somebody else’s place, and at both places I am reminded of how tied I am to my own tea setup, how my habits of tea making are determined by the teaware I use. It’s not the yixing pots or the cups or even the tea that really determined my tea making. It’s one specific thing of my kettle — the spout.

This might sound a little silly, but the spout of a kettle really determines how it pours, and that in turn greatly affects how I make tea. At the first tea meeting, I kept overshooting my pot (easily portable) when I tried to pour water into it. The spout on the water kettle there makes sure the water comes out at an angle that is not the same as the kettles I use, and thus I kept misjudging the first few times I poured. At the second place there was no such problem, although I am still reminded of how much I miss my kettle and my whole setup at home.

Kettle spouts come in all shapes and sizes. These are the ones I have at home

The one on my current tetsubin is the second, and not surprisingly, it gives me the most control in the speed of pouring. The last one is my electric kettle. It looks a little too wide, although it doesn’t drip at all, even though it seems like it might. It actually can pour a very fine pour, but it takes quite a bit of practice. The first is a spout on a simple stainless steel kettle. It does the job, but very hard to pour a fine pour of just a little water. The third is the flat tetsubin that I now have as a spare. It pours fine, except that it does drip a little (shorter spout and less tapering) and also is quirky because of the level of water vis-a-vis the level of the spout. Over time, I tihnk I am used to the higher levels of control that my kettles’ spout affords me, and also the perculiar ways they are shaped. The comforts of home, in this case, includes a familiarity with my teaware when I make my tea, and coming back to it makes me very happy.