Tea Experiment – Different Cups
I like to read the Leaf, there are some excellent articles on tea there. Compared with a lot of the information on the internet, they are much more in depth. Tea is simple in that you either like it or you don’t, so experimenting is a great way to expand your understanding of tea. I think the first experiment I did with tea was with different temperatures of water.
One article called Gong Fu Tea Tips (Part 3) highlights a few tea experiments you can do. After a long time, I finally tried experiment # 4, using different cups. A 30 min train ride from Taipei is a town called YingGe, which is famous for pottery. It’s a great place to walk around, relax and view some really beautiful pottery. The cobblestone streets are closed off to cars, and you can even make your own pottery for about $3 US.
While there, I purchased two cheap tea cups (Each $4 US) and after getting home realized my daily tea tasted totally different in them. I got out my best tea cups. They are about 100 years old, and were a gift from a friend (Thank you Aaron!). The tea tasted quite different. The new cup had a slight unpleasant taste, and the old cup also gave the tea a certain smoothness or roundness. It’s hard to describe, sometimes in Asia people say good teas will immediately coat your entire mouth. Almost like there is a different viscosity to the tea. With the old cups the sensation I got was more like this.
Does this really matter? I think the main point is that I bought some bad teacups. I’ve bought other cheap, new cups before and never had this experience. When comparing these bad cups directly to my best ones, I was really surprised to find out how much difference there is. How can this be?
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