This is a wonderful and convenient travel set for gongfu cha. Using it requires some improvisation of some kind of a draining table/tray at the destination, but the set takes up very little room in a carry-on bag. (The gaiwan in front of the case in the photograph fits into the case inside of the [...]
Like many people immersing themselves in aspects of tea cultures and traditions I go through a process of learning better ways of brewing particular teas and learning about the traditional best types of teaware to use with them. My pattern has often been to make smallish initial investments into one specific type of teaware and [...]
This is the only post I’ve written about tea that has required a saintly level of restraint in order to avoid excessive swearing. I have been planning on writing an article about poorly designed teaware for some time, and I have just discovered how bad design is not only annoying, but can be downright dangerous. [...]
Before any of the tea samples arrived, I spent some time on the auraTeas website and found it quite nicely laid out and easy to navigate. Searching for particular teas by type or by region is a pretty smooth process. There are a few errors in English throughout the site, but they’re not too [...]
For me, a large part of the enjoyment of tea culture is in the appreciation of design and artistry of teaware. Teapots and accessories must always be well suited for the task that they perform on a technical level, but they should also be attractive. Of course “attractive” is quite subjective, and fortunately the enormous [...]
