Teaware
The objects tea is made with, described rather than recommended. What each one is, where it comes from, and what changes if you use something else.
Brewing vessels
30Where the leaf meets the water. The choice changes heat retention, how much room the leaf has to open, and — with unglazed clay — what the vessel gives back to later brews.
A metal teapot with a long curved spout, a domed hinged lid and a heat-resistant handle, used across the Maghreb. Unlike almost every other teapot in this catalogue it goes directly onto the flame: the tea is brought back to the boil in it with the sugar and mint present, which is a decoction rather than a steep.
A heat-resistant pot, usually borosilicate glass with a wide base and a spout, made to sit on a heat source with leaf and water in it. It is the vessel for boiling rather than steeping — aged white tea, dark tea, ripe pu-erh and roasted oolong at the end of a gongfu session, where the leaf is exhausted for short infusions but not exhausted for a simmer.
An ordinary open saucepan, which is the correct and traditional vessel for every preparation where tea is boiled rather than steeped — masala chai, noon chai, butter tea, salted milk tea, boiled dark tea. It is listed because the equipment for the world’s most-made tea preparations is usually a pan, and catalogues of teaware tend to leave that out.
Two kettles that nest: a larger one below that boils water on the hob, and a smaller one above — the demlik — that holds the leaf. The upper pot never touches the flame, and is held at steeping heat by the steam and the hot metal beneath it.
A wide, shallow bowl in which matcha is whisked and from which it is drunk. The width is functional rather than decorative: a whisk needs room to move laterally, and a narrow mug makes proper suspension impossible however vigorously it is worked.
A tall mug with a fitted lid and often a removable inner basket, used for grandpa-style drinking at a desk. The lid does two things worth naming: it holds heat during a long slow drink, and tilted slightly it holds the leaf back while you sip, which is why the basket is optional.
A sealed bottle or carafe with a long removable filter core, made for steeping leaf in cold water in a refrigerator. Everything about it is convenience — the extraction happens whether or not the vessel is purpose-built — but the filter core does solve the one real nuisance, which is straining several hours of steeped leaf out of a full jug.
The teapot of Korean tea practice, made in top-handle, side-handle and back-handle forms and typically larger than a gongfu pot and smaller than a western one. It is used with water already cooled in a separate bowl, so it is not asked to do the heat management a Chinese or Japanese pot is asked to do.
A larger Japanese pot with an arched handle of bamboo or cane across the top, made for serving several people rather than for careful single-cup brewing. It is the everyday household vessel for roasted and coarse teas, which want volume and boiling water rather than restraint.
Enamel-lined cast iron teapot
鉄急須Cast iron with a vitreous enamel interior l…Non-porousOrigin: Japanese in derivationA cast iron pot with a glassy enamel lining, made for steeping tea at the table. It is constantly confused with a tetsubin, and the confusion matters in a practical way: this vessel must never go on a heat source, and a tetsubin is made for exactly that.
A lidded bowl, usually porcelain, used as the default gongfu brewing vessel. The lid holds the leaf back while the liquor is poured off.
A transparent brewing vessel, usually borosilicate. It contributes nothing to the tea, which is its point twice over: it is entirely neutral in flavour and it lets the leaf be watched, which is the only practical way to learn what a properly opened leaf looks like.
A thick-walled glazed pot, heavier than porcelain and considerably heavier than glass. The wall thickness is the functional difference: more material means more heat held in the vessel itself, so the water inside cools more slowly during a long steep.
A small handleless pot with a lid and an integral filter, used for shaded Japanese green tea. The absent handle is not a stylistic choice: this vessel is used at water temperatures low enough that the body never becomes too hot to hold, and a handle would advertise a heat the method is designed to avoid.
The Japanese teapot, most often with a handle at right angles to the spout rather than opposite it. Its distinguishing feature is a wide built-in filter — usually a fine ceramic mesh across the whole spout wall — which is what allows deep-steamed sencha’s fine leaf particles to be poured off without clogging.
An unglazed teapot from Qinzhou in Guangxi, made from a blend of two local clays and finished by burnishing rather than by glazing. Its surface is the distinguishing fact: the sheen is polished into the fired body with a stone or a blade, so the pot is smooth to the hand and still porous, which a glaze would not allow.
Brewers, baskets, lids and travel vessels made from heat-tolerant plastics. What can be stated about the material in use is that it is light, it does not shatter, it conducts heat poorly, and its surface takes up aroma from smoky, roasted and heavily scented teas in a way glass and porcelain do not.
A cylindrical jug with a mesh plunger, borrowed from coffee. It gives leaf complete freedom to expand, which is its real advantage, and then fails to separate leaf from water at the end, which is its real limitation — the plunger holds the leaf down in the liquid rather than removing it.
The neutral workhorse: glazed, non-porous, flavour-free and usable across every category of tea without carry-over. How well a given pot holds heat follows its wall thickness and mass far more than the word porcelain — a thick porcelain pot stays hot longer than a thin stoneware one — so preheating the pot is worth more than any ranking of materials.
Quick-brew infuser press
飄逸杯Borosilicate glass or heat-resistant plasti…Non-porousOrigin: Taiwanese in design and now widely madeAn inner chamber holding leaf and water inside an outer jug, with a valve released by a button so the liquor drains through and the leaf stays behind. It reproduces the one mechanical requirement of short-steep brewing — separating liquid from leaf quickly and completely — without any of the skill of pouring a gaiwan.
Ru-glaze crackle ware
汝窯 / 開片Porcelain or fine stoneware under a deliber…Non-porousOrigin: The name belongs to a Northern Song imperia…Modern tea ware finished with a deliberately crazed pale glaze and sold under the name of a Northern Song imperial kiln. The crazing is not a flaw and is the reason people buy it: tea enters the cracks and darkens them progressively, so the pattern draws itself over months of use.
A wide, shallow, handleless brewing dish whose filter is a set of ridges or a narrow gap moulded into the body rather than a mesh. The name describes the action — the liquor is squeezed out through that gap — and the shape describes the intent: broad and flat, so water poured in loses heat immediately.
A pot or kettle in solid or plated silver. Two physical properties are certain and pull against each other: silver conducts heat better than any other common vessel material, so it heats through instantly and also loses heat to the room faster than ceramic, and its surface is non-porous and takes up nothing.
A pot in stainless steel, single- or double-walled. Single-walled steel is thin and a good conductor, so it sheds heat quickly and becomes too hot to hold; double-walled steel traps air between the skins and is the opposite on both counts, which is why almost every insulated teapot is built that way.
A small gaiwan or pot with several cups that nest inside it, packed in a padded case. The compromise it makes is size: the vessels are smaller than their table equivalents, which shortens every infusion, and the cups are usually too shallow to hold a full pour comfortably.
An insulated bottle with a built-in basket or a removable strainer section, for brewing loose leaf away from a kitchen. The useful designs separate the leaf from the water once the steep is done; the ones that leave leaf sitting in the water all day produce a bitter drink by mid-morning.
Unglazed teapots made from clays other than Yixing zisha — Jianshui purple pottery from Yunnan, Chaozhou red clay, Japanese Tokoname. They share Yixing’s porosity and heat retention at a fraction of the price, and none of its collector market.
A pot of roughly 400 ml to 1.2 litres, usually with an integrated strainer or a removable basket, for single-steep brewing.
A small unglazed teapot made from zisha clay from Yixing in Jiangsu. Its defining property is porosity: the clay takes up a trace of oil and aroma from the tea passing through it, accumulating over years of use rather than session by session, which is why a Yixing pot is traditionally dedicated to a single tea and never washed with detergent.
The small teapot that sits on the crown of a samovar and holds zavarka, a deliberately strong concentrate that is diluted in the glass with hot water from the tap below. Its whole design follows from that: it is small, it is kept warm rather than heated, and the tea in it is not meant to be drinkable as poured.
Serving vessels
2Hold the finished liquor between brewing and pouring, so an infusion stops extracting and every cup from it tastes the same.
A small jug that the whole infusion is poured into before being distributed to cups. Its purpose is in its Chinese name — gong dao bei, 'fairness cup': because the first liquor out of a vessel is weaker than the last, pouring into a pitcher first ensures every cup is identical.
A double-walled vessel with the air evacuated between the walls, which nearly removes conduction as a route for heat to leave. For tea it is used two ways that should not be confused: carrying already-brewed tea, and carrying hot water to brew with later.
Drinking vessels
12What the tea is drunk from. Small cups keep a gongfu session hot through many infusions; a wide mouth gives aroma somewhere to go.
A tall narrow cup used in Taiwanese practice alongside the drinking cup. Tea is poured into it first, the drinking cup is inverted over it, the pair is turned over so the tea transfers, and the empty aroma cup is then smelled — the residual warmth releases aromatics that the liquid itself does not give up.
Korean stoneware coated in white slip and then decorated by incising, stamping, brushing or dipping, under a thin transparent glaze. The relevant physical fact for tea is the slip layer: it sits between a dark body and a thin glaze, and where the brushwork leaves it thin the surface is more open than a fully glazed one.
Celadon tea ware
青瓷 / 청자Porcelain or stoneware under a thick iron-b…Non-porousOrigin: Two distinct traditions that should not be …Ware finished with a thick translucent glaze coloured pale green to blue-grey by iron fired in a reducing atmosphere. For tea the relevant property is optical rather than chemical: a pale cool interior shows liquor colour clearly, which is why celadon cups and pitchers are used where colour is part of the judgement.
A wide, thick-walled Korean bowl for drinking tea, in stoneware with a loose ash or slip glaze and an exposed foot. Its relationship to the Japanese chawan is the useful fact: many of the bowls most valued in chanoyu are Korean-made vessels, and Korean and Japanese bowls are neither the same object nor unrelated ones.
A borosilicate cup made as two skins with a sealed air gap between them. The air gap is a poor conductor, so the outer skin stays cool enough to hold while the tea inside stays hot longer than it would in a single-walled glass — the same principle as a vacuum flask, without the vacuum.
A soft, low-fired ware from Yamaguchi prefecture, glazed in pale straw and white and almost always crazed. Its defining physical property is that the body beneath the glaze is open and the glaze is cracked, so liquid passes through the crazing into the body — which is why a Hagi bowl visibly changes colour with use.
Jian ware tea bowl (jianzhan)
建盞Heavy iron-rich stoneware under an iron-sat…Non-porousOrigin: ChineseA dark-glazed conical stoneware bowl from Jianyang in Fujian, whose iron-saturated glaze separates during firing into streaks or spots. It was made for whisked powdered tea and the colour is functional: white froth on a near-black ground is easy to read, and judging the froth was the point of the contest the bowls were made for.
A small unglazed earthenware cup, thrown and low-fired, used once for chai at railway platforms and roadside stalls across northern India and then broken or discarded. It is the only genuinely single-use vessel in this catalogue and its porosity is not managed but spent: the cup absorbs some of the drink and is thrown away before that matters.
The vessel yerba mate is drunk from — classically a hollowed and dried calabash, also made in wood, horn and ceramic. A natural gourd is porous and organic, which is why a new one must be cured before use and why a cured gourd is used for one preparation and kept in that role.
The small cups a gongfu session is drunk from, typically 25 to 50 ml. The size is functional rather than ceremonial: a session gives six to fifteen infusions and each one is different, so the cup has to be small enough that a whole infusion fits in one and can be drunk while it still tastes of what it is.
Tea glass
ince belli bardak / استکانClear glassNon-porousOrigin: Several distinct traditions with different …A small clear glass, usually waisted, used across Turkey, Iran, the Caucasus, Iraq and the Maghreb. Clarity is functional rather than decorative: where tea is served as concentrate diluted to order, the colour of the poured glass is how strength is agreed between server and drinker without anybody tasting it.
A tall handleless cup for everyday Japanese tea, taller than it is wide and thicker at the rim than a tasting cup. Height over width means a smaller surface exposed to the air, so the tea cools more slowly than it would in a bowl — the opposite design intent from a chawan, which is meant to be drunk warm and quickly.
Kettles
11Heat and hold the water. Temperature is the brewing variable most easily wrong by a wide margin, and the hardest to judge by eye.
Bofura (earthenware water kettle)
ボーフラThin unglazed or lightly glazed earthenware…PorousOrigin: JapaneseA round thin-walled earthenware kettle with a side handle and a small spout, set on the senchado stove to boil water. It is the counterpart to the Chinese sha diao and shares its logic: a thin clay wall over charcoal heats a small volume quickly and is not asked to hold heat afterwards.
Vessels in copper or its alloy brass, historically the standard material for samovars, urns and service trays. Copper conducts heat better than steel and reacts with acidic liquids, which is why the interior of a copper vessel intended to hold a drink is traditionally lined with tin — and why the state of that lining is the thing to check.
Enamelled steel teaware
Pressed steel with a fused vitreous enamel …Non-porousOrigin: Industrial and internationalSteel with a fused glass coating, made as kettles, pots and mugs. The coating is the functional part: it is glass, so it is inert and easy to clean, and it is brittle, so a chip exposes bare steel that then rusts and spreads under the surrounding enamel.
A kettle with a long narrow curved spout that delivers a slow, aimable stream. Pour control and temperature control are separate properties that are frequently sold together and are not the same thing — a gooseneck kettle need not be temperature-controlled, and a temperature-controlled kettle need not have a gooseneck.
Hot water boiler
Stainless steel or plastic-lined tank with …Non-porousOrigin: Japanese in origin as a domestic appliance …An insulated electric vessel that boils a large volume and then holds it at a set temperature all day, dispensing on demand. It is everywhere in East Asian homes and offices for an obvious reason — tea all day with no waiting — and it has one real cost, which is that water held at temperature for hours is not the same water that came out of the tap.
A lidded iron kettle with no spout and no handle, set over the hearth in a tea room and left there for the whole gathering. The absent spout is the point of the object: water is not poured from a kama, it is lifted out a ladleful at a time, so the kettle never leaves the fire and the room never loses the sound of it.
The one piece of equipment every tea drinker already owns, and the one whose limitation matters most: an ordinary kettle boils and stops, giving exactly one temperature. Everything below boiling has to be reached by waiting, pouring or dilution.
A large water urn with an internal flue running up its centre and a tap at the front, with a small teapot resting on the crown. The flue is the design: heat rises through the middle of the water rather than being applied beneath it, so a large volume stays near boiling for hours at low fuel cost while the pot above is warmed indirectly.
A thin-walled unglazed clay kettle with a side handle, used over a charcoal stove in Chaozhou gongfu practice. Thinness is the design: a thin clay wall reaches boiling faster than a thick one and cools faster off the heat, which suits a practice where water is boiled repeatedly in small amounts rather than held hot.
A kettle that heats to a set temperature and often holds it. It is the single most useful upgrade for anyone drinking green, white or yellow tea regularly, because it removes the guesswork from the variable those categories are most sensitive to.
An unlined cast iron kettle for boiling water over a heat source. It is not a teapot and leaf never goes in it. The interior is bare iron, and it is that bare interior — not the shape, not the weight — that separates a tetsubin from the enamel-lined pot it is usually sold beside.
Filters and infusers
9Separate leaf from liquid, or confine it. The tighter the confinement, the less of the leaf ever meets moving water.
A metal straw with a strainer at the submerged end, so that a drink can be taken from a vessel packed with loose plant material without a separate filter. It is a drinking vessel and a filter at once, which is unusual, and the filter design is what separates a good one from a blocked one.
A disposable paper or unbleached cellulose bag the drinker fills with their own loose leaf. It answers the practical objection to loose tea directly — the mess — and it is the honest counter-example to the belief that bags are the problem, since the bag here holds whatever leaf you chose.
The filter built into a Japanese teapot, and the property that most determines whether the pot suits your tea. Three types dominate: sasame, a field of fine holes moulded into the ceramic wall; obiami, a stainless band running round the interior; and a basket dropped into the neck. Filtration area is what separates them, and deep-steamed sencha needs all of it.
A fine mesh screen, often in a small tin with a lid, that matcha is pushed through before water is added. Milled tea compacts into clumps in storage under its own weight and static, and no amount of whisking breaks a compacted clump apart once it is wet — the outside hydrates and seals the inside.
A perforated basket that sits inside a mug, holding the leaf while it steeps and lifting out when the tea is ready. The single most common piece of loose-leaf equipment, and the one whose sizing matters most: a basket too small for the leaf to expand is the commonest cause of weak loose-leaf tea.
A tetrahedral sachet of woven mesh, holding more volume relative to its seams than a flat paper bag and giving whole leaf room to open. It is a genuine improvement on the flat double-chamber bag in one specific respect — headspace — and it is not evidence about the leaf inside it.
A hinged perforated sphere, or a clipped-together spoon, that closes around a measure of leaf. It is the most widely sold piece of loose-leaf equipment and the one most reliably responsible for weak tea, because dry leaf expands several times over and a closed ball gives it nowhere to go.
A long cloth bag on a wire hoop, used in Hong Kong tea houses and across South East Asia to hold and strain a strong tea brew, with the liquor poured through it repeatedly. It is called a stocking because that is what it comes to look like, stained deep tan by use; no stocking is involved.
A small mesh strainer held over the cup while pouring, catching leaf that has been brewing free in the pot. It is the traditional western answer and the correct one for gongfu too, where the leaf must be free to move rather than confined to a basket.
Measurement
10Weigh or portion the leaf. A spoon measures volume, and leaf density varies enough between a rolled oolong and a broken black tea to make that meaningless.
Any device that counts seconds. It earns its place at short steeps and loses it at long ones: five seconds is a quarter of a twenty-second gongfu infusion and a rounding error in a four-minute western steep, so the same instrument is decisive in one style and irrelevant in the other.
A slender curved bamboo scoop for measuring matcha, conventionally holding about one gram per level scoop. It is a measuring tool with no advantage over a scale in accuracy, and a considerable advantage in not requiring one.
A small meter reporting relative humidity and temperature, used by people storing dark tea for ageing. It is the one measuring instrument in tea whose value is in what it rules out: it tells you whether a cupboard is swinging wildly between conditions, which is the thing that damages stored tea most and is invisible without a record.
An instrument that measures how much a liquid bends light and converts that to an estimate of dissolved solids in the finished drink. It is borrowed from speciality coffee, where it is used with a brew weight to compute an extraction yield, and the borrowing carries assumptions that do not transfer cleanly to tea.
A lidded pot with a serrated rim and a matching bowl, used so that several teas can be prepared identically and compared. The purpose is not to brew tea well — the standardised method produces a deliberately hard, over-extracted liquor — but to remove brewing as a variable so that differences in the cup can be attributed to the leaf.
Tasting spoon
Stainless steel or plated silverNon-porousOrigin: Commercial tea and coffee tasting roomsA deep round-bowled spoon used in professional tasting to lift liquor from a bowl and draw it sharply across the palate. The depth and the wide bowl are functional: a full spoon can be taken in one aerating slurp, which spreads the liquid and carries volatile aroma to the back of the nose.
A pen that measures the electrical conductivity of water and converts it to an estimated total dissolved solids figure. It is worth understanding what that number is and is not: conductivity reports how much dissolved ionic material is present in total, and says nothing about which minerals they are.
A scoop for transferring leaf from caddy to vessel. It measures volume, and tea is dosed by mass, and those two things track each other badly: a scoop of dense rolled oolong and the same scoop of airy white tea are nowhere near the same weight, which is why one spoonful of one and one spoonful of another are not comparable doses.
A small scale reading to 0.1 g. Tea leaf varies enormously in density — a teaspoon of tightly rolled gunpowder pellets and a teaspoon of fluffy white tea are nowhere near the same dose by weight — so volume measures are unreliable in a way that mass measures are not.
A probe or infrared reader for checking water temperature. Its real value is not in daily use but in calibration: measure a few times to learn what your kitchen actually does when boiled water stands for three minutes, then stop measuring and use the clock instead.
Whisking
2For powdered leaf, which is suspended in the water rather than steeped and strained out.
A tall narrow wooden cylinder with a close-fitting plunger, used to work boiled tea, butter and salt into an emulsion. The proportions are the design: a narrow bore means the plunger displaces the whole column of liquid on every stroke, which is what breaks the fat into droplets small enough to stay suspended.
A whisk carved from a single piece of bamboo into as many as 120 fine tines. The tine count is the design: they are flexible enough to break up clumps without scraping the glaze off a bowl, and numerous enough to work air through the liquid as fine foam, which a stiff kitchen whisk of a dozen wires does neither of.
Storage
13Keep leaf away from air, light, heat and other smells — the four things that flatten it, none of which brewing can undo.
A small lidded ceramic jar holding the matcha used for thick tea, with an ivory or bone lid faced in gold leaf. The distinction that matters is against the natsume: a chaire is ceramic and holds the powder for koicha, a natsume is lacquered wood and holds the powder for usucha, and the two are not interchangeable within the practice.
A multi-layer bag with a metal foil or metallised film between plastic layers. It is the most effective everyday tea container there is and the least impressive to look at: the metal layer blocks light completely and is a far better barrier to oxygen and water vapour than plain plastic, paper or a loose-lidded tin.
A sealed permeable sachet holding a saturated salt solution, which releases moisture below a target relative humidity and takes it up above one. Its use in tea is confined to dark tea kept for ageing, where humidity is a variable people deliberately manage rather than eliminate.
A lidded jar of cold fresh water kept beside the hearth, from which the kettle is topped up and from which water is taken to rinse the bowl. It exists because the kettle stays on the fire: with no way to refill from a tap mid-gathering, the cold water has to be in the room already.
A small lidded container, classically lacquered wood and named for its resemblance to a jujube fruit, holding the sieved powder for a single occasion. It is a working container rather than long-term storage: matcha dulls quickly once it meets air, so the natsume holds what is about to be used.
A foil pouch fitted with a small plastic valve that lets gas out and not in. The valve was designed for freshly roasted coffee, which releases carbon dioxide for days after roasting and would otherwise burst its packaging, and this is the fact that decides what it is worth on a bag of tea.
A small sachet of iron powder that reacts with oxygen inside a sealed package and takes it out of the headspace. It is used commercially in packing green tea and matcha, usually alongside a nitrogen flush, and its logic is the same as any other storage measure: oxidation in storage is what turns a fresh green tea flat and brown.
A tea container in pewter, an alloy that is mostly tin. Its practical advantage over a pressed steel tin is the lid: pewter is soft enough to be turned to a close tolerance, so a well-made caddy has a heavy push-fit lid that seals against air far better than a snap-on one.
An unglazed or partly glazed clay jar used for storing pu-erh and other dark tea, where the requirement is the opposite of every other category: the tea has to breathe. Sealing raw pu-erh airtight stops the microbial activity that ageing depends on.
An airtight opaque container for keeping tea away from its four enemies: air, light, moisture and odour. Glass looks appealing and fails on light; anything not airtight fails on the other three at once, and tea absorbs kitchen smells more readily than almost any dry good.
An opaque, airtight container for keeping tea. The four things that degrade tea are air, light, heat and moisture, and a good caddy addresses all of them — which is why a clear glass jar on a sunny shelf is close to the worst possible option.
A sealed cabinet — often a converted wine cooler — used to hold dark tea at a chosen humidity and temperature. It is a serious piece of equipment for a narrow purpose, and it is worth being blunt that it is bought by people ageing tea deliberately over years, not by people storing tea to drink.
An opaque container with a lid that pumps some of the air out and holds a partial vacuum against a gasket. The physical claim is modest and true: less air in the container means less oxygen against the leaf. The claim not to accept is that a domestic pump lid produces anything close to a real vacuum, because it does not.
Accessories
29Everything around the brewing itself: trays that catch the water, cloths that mop it, tools for prising compressed tea apart.
A small reservoir of denatured alcohol with a wick, used under a kettle or a serving pot. It gives more heat than a tealight and much less than an element or charcoal, which places it accurately: it will hold a pot at temperature and will not boil a kettle from cold in any reasonable time.
The upright pot of implements that stands beside a gongfu tray, conventionally six: a needle for clearing a blocked spout, a scoop for dosing leaf, a funnel that widens a pot’s mouth, tongs for handling hot cups, a spoon for lifting spent leaf out, and the vase that holds them.
A shallow curved dish, usually with a narrowed spout at one end, that dry leaf is poured into before brewing so it can be looked at and smelled, then tipped into the vessel. It exists because the dry leaf is the part of a session most easily skipped and the part that tells you most about what is about to happen.
A small clay or metal stove that heats a kettle with charcoal, used in Chaozhou gongfu practice. It heats slowly, holds heat steadily and is far more work than an electric element, which is most of what there is to say about it functionally. The Japanese chanoyu brazier is written with the same characters and is a separate object with a separate practice around it, recorded at `equip-s32-ro-and-furo`.
A small individual stand that a tasting cup sits on, in wood, bamboo, ceramic or metal. Its practical value is that it can be picked up and handed to someone with a full, very hot, handleless cup on it, which is otherwise an awkward transaction.
Electric ceramic tea stove
電陶爐Ceramic or mica plate over a resistive heat…Non-porousOrigin: Chinese and contemporaryA radiant electric plate that heats by glowing element rather than by induction, so it heats anything set on it regardless of material. That is the reason it is the common tea-table heat source in China where induction is not: glass boiling pots, clay kettles and unlined iron all sit on it, and none of them work on induction.
A small stand that the hot kettle lid and the bamboo ladle are set on, so neither touches the mats. It is a trivet, and the reason it has a name and a literature is that in a room with no work surface every object needs a defined place to be put down.
A long-handled bamboo ladle used to lift hot water from a kettle or jar into the bowl. It exists because in the setting it belongs to the water is held in an open vessel over a hearth that cannot be picked up and poured, so the water must be lifted a measure at a time.
A plate that heats a vessel by inducing a current in it, so the plate itself stays comparatively cool and the vessel does the heating. That mechanism is also its limitation for tea: it only works with ferromagnetic material, so a cast iron kettle works and a glass, clay, copper or aluminium one does not.
The open vessel that rinse water is emptied into during a chanoyu gathering. Functionally it is identical to the Chinese waste bowl, and it is worth saying that plainly: the same job, the same shape, two practices that arrived at it separately and place the object very differently within the room.
A ridged ceramic dome that a bamboo whisk is stored on, tines downward and spread. Bamboo dries in whatever shape it is left in: a whisk stood on its handle dries with its tines curled inward, and a whisk on a stand dries with them held open, which is the shape it needs to work.
A bowl and a blunt grinding tool, used in spiced tea preparation to crack whole spices open rather than to powder them. The distinction is the point: cracking exposes the interior so it can extract in a simmer, while grinding to dust makes a gritty drink that cannot be strained clear.
A metal frame with a handle that a glass of tea sits inside, solving the problem the glass creates: it is hot, it has no handle, and it is thin. Long associated with Russian rail travel, where the weighted base also made a glass of tea considerably harder to knock over on a moving train.
The two heat arrangements of a chanoyu room and the seasonal alternation between them. The ro is a hearth cut into the floor and used in the cold months; the furo is a portable brazier set on the mats and used in the warm ones. The functional difference is distance — the sunken hearth puts the fire nearer the guest and the brazier puts it further away.
A small white clay stove with a draught opening at the front, used in senchado to heat a water kettle over charcoal. It belongs to a different utensil set from chanoyu’s: senchado brews leaf tea in small pots and its equipment answers to that, which is why its stove is a table object rather than a hearth.
A pair of cut granite wheels that grind tencha into matcha. It is slow on purpose: the grooves cut into the stones shear the leaf rather than crushing it, and turning slowly keeps the powder cool, because heat during milling is what dulls the aroma of the finished tea.
A shallow dish that sits under a teapot or gaiwan to catch the water poured over and around it during a gongfu session. Rinsing water, the discarded first infusion and the water used to warm the vessels all end up here rather than on the table.
An absorbent cloth kept beside the tray during a gongfu session for wiping the base of a pot before pouring and mopping spills as they happen. Minor, and the thing most likely to be missing from a first setup.
An insulated cover that goes over a full teapot. It does exactly what it claims — a covered pot loses heat far more slowly than a bare one — and that is a benefit or a problem depending entirely on whether the leaf is still in the pot.
A cloth or woven mat laid under the vessels to define a brewing surface, used in place of a draining tray. It is the visible half of what is usually called dry-table brewing: no water is poured onto the table at all, waste goes into a bowl, and the setup is a cloth rather than a plumbed slab of wood.
A small unglazed clay figure kept on the tray and poured over with leftover tea during a session, which gradually darkens and takes on a sheen. It has no brewing function of any kind, and is included here because it is a common object that readers encounter and reasonably wonder about.
A blunt flat blade or awl for separating leaf from a compressed cake or brick. The technique matters more than the tool: the pick is worked along the layers to lift leaf out whole, never chopped downward, because shredded leaf brews bitter and unevenly.
Simple sprung tongs for lifting cups out of hot rinse water and passing them to guests without handling the rims. In a session where every cup is scalded before use, this is the difference between a hygienic habit and burnt fingers.
A slatted or double-layered tray that catches spilled water, used because gongfu brewing involves deliberate overflow — rinsing vessels, warming cups, pouring off. It is furniture for a practice rather than a brewing tool, and entirely optional.
A stand holding a teapot above a tealight or a small electric plate. It applies gentle heat from below indefinitely, which keeps a pot of already-strained tea at drinking temperature and does something much less welcome to a pot with leaf still in it.
A deep open jar that rinse water, discarded first infusions and cup-warming water are poured into. It is the alternative to a draining tray, and it suits a smaller table: a tray needs plumbing or a reservoir, and a bowl needs neither.
A wide open bowl with a lip, used to cool boiled water before it reaches the leaf. It does one job and does it more repeatably than waiting does: a broad shallow layer of water loses heat quickly and by a similar amount each time, so the same sequence of pours lands in roughly the same place without any measurement.
A jug with a replaceable cartridge, usually activated carbon with an ion-exchange resin. For tea it does two useful and quite different things: the carbon takes out chlorine compounds, which are the most obvious off-flavour in treated tap water, and the resin removes some hardness, which changes extraction rather than smell.
A wide open pouring vessel that boiled water is decanted into to bring it down before it reaches shaded green tea. Physically it is the same solution as the Korean sukwoo and the same manoeuvre as pouring between two cups: broad surface, shallow layer, fast and repeatable heat loss.
One pot, one tea
Unglazed clay is porous. Over a session it takes up a trace of the oils and aromatics in the liquor, and over many sessions it gives some of that back into whatever is brewed in it next. That is the whole basis of the convention that a clay pot is kept for one tea, or at most for one family of teas: a pot seasoned by years of roasted oolong will carry that character into a delicate green tea brewed in it, and there is no way to wash it out again without stripping what the pot has become.
13 of the 118 objects here are recorded as porous, and each says on its own page what its porosity means in practice. Glazed porcelain and glass are inert by comparison, which is exactly why they are used to taste a tea plainly.
What this section is not
TeaHQ describes teaware. It does not recommend products, rank brands, name makers to buy from, or link to shops. Every page here answers what the object is and what it does to the tea, and each carries a note on what to use instead when you do not own one — which is the more useful answer far more often than a purchase would be.