A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘teaware’

Buying things on eBay

April 12, 2011 · 9 Comments

eBay, the great American fleamarket, is both a source of frustration as well as a source of treasure.  I recently found this

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Which I basically bought for a song.  These things routinely sell for $100 or more in antique shops, and I got it for $35, which I think is quite a deal, especially considering it is quite pristine in condition.  However, most of the time, it’s hard to find things like this.  Over the years I’ve gotten a few good things from eBay, in terms of teaware — a few cups, an old gaiwan, a tetsubin, and other oddities.  That, however, is only possible after many hours of trolling on the site, looking for bargains.  I think in general, when looking for antique teaware on eBay, there are three categories of goods. (I am not talking about new things, like a cheap new gaiwan, or things like teas, which are a different matter)

1) The obviously nice stuff. These are things that are obviously good, old, and nice.  They are also watched by many, and are rarely cheap.  Older Yixing pots, for example, fall into this category.  There is a big group of very (and sometimes less) knowledgeable collectors on eBay who will buy any and all antique Yixing pots.  Those pewter wrapped ones, for example, routinely end at over $1,000, and the same can be said for anything that looks like they are the real deal from the Qing or the Republic.  There are no bargains to be had here.

2) The fake. This is the vast majority of stuff on eBay when it comes to older teaware.  They are fake, and most of the time, obviously so.  Stores like 5000friends, for example, have an endless supply of “Qing” and “Republic” pots that I’m sure are fake, and 5000friends is definitely one of the better fake vendors, when compared with the other, worse fake vendors.  Basically, for Yixing for example, if the stuff is coming directly from China, you can assume it’s fake, because there is no good reason why the person will put it on eBay if it is real — it is far easier and better to sell within China if you have a genuinely old Yixing pot than if you sell it on eBay.  It just doesn’t make any sense.

3) The hidden treasures.  This is where the bargains are, but it comes at a price.  They are only bargains because they are usually poorly described and has few or no pictures.  This pot above, for example, only had one picture on the site.  In other words, I was gambling that the pot is indeed in pristine condition and that the other side looks ok, which it turned out to be, but there was no guarantee (and I think why it had no bids).  This is getting increasingly rare, but sometimes you see a fuzzy picture and that’s all you’ve got to rely on, or if the title is mistyped, or if the person doesn’t know what they’re selling — for example, describing a Yixing pot as a children’s toy because it’s so small.  Even then, there will be other treasure hunters out there doing the same thing you are, which is scouring through these listings looking for good stuff, but once in a while, you can find cheap things and you’ll get lucky, just like any real life flea market.

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Antique roadshow

April 5, 2011 · 5 Comments

Living in the part of the US that I do, hitting antique shops sometimes yield some decent loot.

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This isn’t anything too special, just some Republican period export ware.  Nevertheless, it’s not a bad find, since it’s not expensive and is still in pretty good condition.  There was a better one last year that I passed up, and which I forever regret, but alas, can’t buy them all.

These pots are usually big.  They’re very impractical for making tea the usual way, so I tend to use them for half-grandpa brewing — leaves in a pot with renewed water whenever I feel like it.  This is usually done to squeeze the last bits out of somewhat spent leaves, and it works pretty well.

Edit: I should also note that pots like these seem to err on the low-fired side of things.  You almost never see the really high fired, close to glossy finish that is so common on new pots.  I wonder if that’s deliberate, or accidental because they couldn’t get the heat up as high as modern electric kilns can.

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Resurrection

March 29, 2011 · 33 Comments

A few years ago, I bought a silver kettle.  Only problem is, it leaked.  The part where the spout connects to the body was falling apart, so while it was ok to make, say, matcha with it, since matcha doesn’t require a lot of water, it was impossible to use the kettle for Chinese tea, when I need full pots of water.  The joint was visibly cracked.

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So for the past two years, the kettle’s been sitting in a tomobako, waiting to see the light of day.  I almost forgot about it at one point.  It’s hard looking for a silversmith — the few I did find in real life didn’t handle this type of work.

I knew the work had to be done, sooner or later, and finally worked up the time to do some research to find someone who can fix it.  Some googling later, I decided on this guy, Jeffery Herman of Herman Silver.  (Yes, this is a plug, because I liked the end result)  I must say it took a bit of courage and trust — after all, you’re sending a valuable piece of silver to somebody you’ve never met, and you really have no idea how it’ll turn out, or if they’re even legitimate.  I figured, though, that if he’s no good, I would be able to find something about it on the internet, and I couldn’t.

I finally got the kettle back today, after about two to three weeks of work.  I must say I’m quite pleased.

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Looking like new, and he even cleaned up the interior of the kettle, which had some yellow deposit.  Most importantly, of course, he re-soldered the spout, and it no longer leaks.

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It’s not the cheapest – $250 for all this work, but I am quite glad I did it, because now the kettle can serve its intended function again.

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An old new acquisition

March 22, 2011 · 6 Comments

Shopping at old teashops in Hong Kong is always fun.  You find things unexpected, like this one

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What is it, you may ask?  The date says 1978, April 27th.  Sadly, it’s not old tea, but nevertheless, it’s well worth the money — it’s a tea tray.

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It’s brand spanking new, but old at the same time, especially since these are no longer made and so are quite hard to find in good condition, never mind a brand new one.  Most old shops have one or two that they use regularly, but no more.  This is a smaller one, big enough for four cups and a shuiping, but not a lot of room left after that.  I’ve always wanted one of these, and now have found one.  Too bad there’s a one-per-customer limit, because otherwise I’ll buy them all.

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Yixing vs gaiwan vs Jianshui

March 9, 2011 · Leave a Comment

Martin, a reader of this blog, has posted a series of tasting notes of side-by-side comparisons of using yixing pot vs a gaiwan vs a jianshui pot (most likely from YSLLC, I’d iamgine).  It’s well worth reading, so please take a look.

Categories: Information · Objects
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Using yixing pots

March 5, 2011 · 12 Comments

I used to be a yixing skeptic.  I remember buying my first pot, mostly for fun, back when I was still in college.  I had no idea what I was doing then, and like many of us, paid some tuition along the way.  My first pot came from Tenren, of all places, and was far too large for anything decent.  Eventually, I forgot about some wet leaves in it one time (green tieguanyin) and the pot is now no more.

I remember that for the longest time I was a gaiwan user — I didn’t use pots because I thought they messed up the taste of the teas.  I want the pure, unadulterated taste of the tea itself, not whatever the pot is doing to it, so gaiwan it was.  There was also a practical aspect of it, since I was traveling a lot and carrying anything more than a gaiwan is absolutely insane.  So, for the longest time, there were very few pots in the picture.

Over time, however, I have come to appreciate them and have used them more and more.  Teas do taste different whether brewed with pots or gaiwans, and different pots do indeed do different things to the same tea.  I remember when I visited N in Paris, he remarked how his teas taste different — all because I was using a gaiwan instead of his usual pot for the tea.  I now rationalize my use of pots for testing new teas as this: if I normally use this pot for drinking this kind of tea, then I should use this pot to test it.  If it tastes terrible with my pot, then I am highly unlikely to enjoy the tea in the long run.

Recently though I have added gaiwan back into the mix of teaware I use with some regularity.  For example, I recently tried to drink a tea that I have a few cakes of.  It’s a Yiwu from about five or six years ago.  In the gaiwan, the tea was sour — enough so that it’s bothersome.  In my usual pot for it, the tea is not sour, and displays the characteristic “Yiwu” taste much more clearly.  Otherwise, they are similar in profile, but somehow, the tea is improved in the pot.

I’m still not quite sure how this is even possible.  I don’t really buy the theory that pots season significantly enough so that it affects the tea in question.  They do seem to soften the harsh flavours in a tea, for better or worse, and make the tea more enjoyable.  There are tangible benefits to using pots.

Then there are the more question benefits – for example, do older pots do better?  How much does clay quality actually matter?  Does a pot with bad clay do more or less the same thing as a pot with good clay?  How about clays from different places — tokoname, for example, rather than yixing, or shantou pots?  Thickness of the pot?  Pot collectors are, by and large, not really serious tea drinkers.  Like any type of collecting activity, they value the rare, the unusual, the famous, rather than the practical.  The best pots for brewing tea is often not the best pots for collecting (just witness the huge 400cc pots that these collectors love to buy).  I don’t know anyone who has actually tried to do this sort of study in any serious way.  It will be interesting to find out how these various factors play into the taste of the tea.  I have some ideas, but then, my ideas could very well be wrong.

Categories: Information · Objects
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Yamada Jozan

February 28, 2011 · 13 Comments

I’m using this today

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Looks awfully like a yixing, but is in fact a tokoname pot made by one of the Yamada Jozan (there have been three so far, in good Japanese tradition of passing down the name).  I’m not quite sure which generation made this particular one — some indication online seems to suggest the first, but I can be wrong.  This type of pot was made basically in imitation of yixing ware, and the Yamadas have been particularly good at it.  I got this without the original tomobako, but it comes with a yuzamashi and five cups.  I’m only using the pot at the moment, and ignoring the rest.  Obviously, this was intended for sencha, but I’m making Chinese tea with this, with good results.

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Mystery (tea) ware

February 21, 2011 · 25 Comments

In the spirit of misappropriating wares, I present the latest example:

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I’m not entirely sure what this thing is.  I’m pretty sure I’m not using it right.  My guess is that it’s better for cups — putting, say, four small cups on it and then pouring tea into them would be what I think this can be used for, although for that purpose, this thing is slightly too small, unless the cups are tiny.

I tried using it like this yesterday, and it seems too precarious for the pot to sit so high.  It does hold a decent amount of tea underneath though, so that when I pour the wash over the pot, it does collect and go right in.  That’s almost certainly what the holes are for — some sort of liquid.  I just can’t quite figure out what’s supposed to go on top…

The mystery continues

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Aged matcha

January 28, 2011 · 9 Comments

One of the great advantages of drinking matcha, as opposed to leaf tea of all sorts, is that it is faster, much faster.  From start to finish, you’re done in at most half an hour, and quicker if you want to.  I knew today was going to be a busy day of meetings and what not, and that I won’t get a chance to drink a real cup of tea until maybe 8 or even 9 pm, so I pre-caffeinated myself with some matcha.  It also served as an opportunity to use my rarely used chawans, which, in today’s case, is an akaraku I bought maybe a year or so ago.

It is always an experience opening the tomobako (wooden box), with the brocade that comes with a piece and in this case, the artist’s signature as well as the name of the bowl, which is called “Tokiwa” or eternity.  But, before I can get to the bowl, the Safety & Security brigade have to examine the box first

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Now that we know it’s safe, I can take it out for pictures.

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I love raku ware. They have a soft, supple tactile feel and a lightness to them that are the direct opposite of what you’d expect when you just look at them — big, sturdy looking things that are often quite heavy-set. They sound like wood, rather than ceramic, when you tap on them, and I can’t quite find the same feeling with any other kind of ceramics, Hagi included. Kuroraku bowls are serious, whereas akaraku, at least in my own untrained opinion, seems more cheerful.

So it is really rather sad that I don’t have good matcha to go with it today. The only thing I have at the moment is more than a year old, which, as you can imagine, is not an optimal age for matcha. The tea, while it still retained much of the flavour, lost the high, fragrant notes and the sweetness that makes matcha so good. It also gained a bit of an unpleasant side-taste to it that I don’t particularly enjoy. This is a problem with me and all types of green tea — I can never, ever drink them fast enough so that they don’t go bad. I drink green tea so sparingly that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to finish anything in a season. While a can of matcha only costs maybe $20 or $30, a bag of top notch longjing will set me back $100 or more, easily, for a 3oz bag. That’s mostly why I have stopped buying green tea entirely — it’s simply not worth that much to me, especially since half of it inevitably goes wasted.

It’s always fun to play with matcha ware though. I should really do this more often.

Categories: Objects · Teas
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White clay?

May 17, 2010 · 7 Comments

A new acquisition

The pot is rather small, with a diameter about the same as a regular camera lens.  It’s also got an interesting look on the clay — feels almost liquid, rather than sandy.

I still need to clean it, but I already love the colour of the pot.

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