Overview
Tea Ware comes in many shapes, forms and sizes even though you really don’t need all that stuff. What you do need is something to put your tealeaves in, and add the hot water to. A teapot generally works for this rather well. It also helps to have a teacup handy.
If two pieces of tea ware is still a bit much for you, you can further cut this down, and just use a Gaiwan, which is really just a clever teacup without a handle – or you can just break the handle off your grandmother’s teacup and call it a Gaiwan. You can also simply scoop some tealeaves into the palm of your hand, add the hot water, and drink it straight like that – however, this may be somewhat painful. There are a few rather people who have followed this suggestion and as expected they did not fare well.
Variety of Choice
For those less minimally inclined, the choices are endless. Teapot, teacup, tea strainer, tea cozies, tea trays, tea spoons, tea scoops, tea cans, tea jars, tea tables, gaiwans, tea kettles and more. All produced in every material imaginable and every color under the sun. Go Japanese and use a Gaiwan, or Chinese with a Yixing pot, English with a tea bag squeezer, German with a tea sock, American with an iced tea pitcher. The choice is yours. Mix and match go overboard, it’s entirely up to you. Tea ware can cost you nothing at all, or as much as you’d spend on buying a car. If you want to spend a lot of money on tea ware, go ahead but it’s not necessary at all and does not enhance the tea drinking experience. Better to spend your money on the tea, or the car, than ritzy paraphernalia.
You can buy tea ware in brick and mortar stores, or online, or you can pinch your neighbors’ if you like their stuff better than yours. Generally that’s not recommended since they probably don’t have anything nice anyway, and you’d get in trouble, ending up in some dingy jail with Big Al calling you his Tea Boy. Remember, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s tea ware. While there have been some successful tea heists in history, chances are, you aren’t that smart, or lucky.
Tea Ware Fetish
Due the vast and expansive array of tea ware available, there are some people who become afflicted with Folium Ollam Libido, or leaf pot lust and sometimes referred to as Tobin’s Disease named after Lord Montegue Guy Tobin of Berkshire, England. Tobin suffered one of the earliest and most prolific cases of Leaf pot lust and over his life time collected over 10,000 different tea ware pieces. On his deathbed, refusing to see his wife or his clergyman, Tobin lay stroking an iron teapot nicknamed, Ol’ Berta.1
This incurable condition afflicts its victims with an insatiable desire to purchase vast collections of tea ware impulsively. Some victim’s of the disease have even been jailed, and in some countries executed for fear that it may be contagious or as punishment for theft of another’s tea pot.
- Ol’ Berta now resides in London’s British Museum next to an original Wardian Case, which was once used by Robert Fortune to steal tea from China ↩
