TeaHQ

Houhin

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.

Brewing vesselNon-porousIntermediate宝瓶

Identity

Category
Brewing vessel
Native name
宝瓶
Romanised
houhin, hohin, hōhin
Also called
handleless kyusu, treasure vessel
Material
Glazed or unglazed porcelain and stoneware; Tokoname and Banko clays are common
Typical capacity
80–180 ml
Skill level
Intermediate

Porosity

Not porous. It contributes nothing of its own to the liquor, so it can be moved between teas freely and washed with detergent without consequence.

Glazed examples are inert. Unglazed ones season slowly like any bare clay and are conventionally kept to one style of tea, though the volumes involved are so small that the effect accumulates slowly.

Where it comes from

Japanese, associated with gyokuro and kabusecha service. TeaHQ describes the object rather than speaking for the practice around it.

Named here rather than presented as generic equipment. The object belongs to a practice, and TeaHQ describes it from the outside.

If you do not own one

A small kyusu does the same job with a handle you will not need. A lidded bowl works too, though the pour is less controlled and a shaded tea’s liquor is too small a volume to spill any of.

This one is not marked essential. The tea can be made without it.

Brewing methods it is used for

  • Low-temperature brewing (gyokuro style) — A great deal of shaded Japanese leaf in a very small volume of water that is deliberately far below boiling — cool enough that the vessel can be held bare-handed. It is the most extreme low-temperature steeping in common practice, and it exists to extract one part of the leaf while leaving another behind.
  • Ice steeping (kōridashi) — Ice cubes placed directly on dry leaf and left to melt, with no water added at all. The liquor arrives as the ice goes, drop by drop, and there is very little of it. It is the coldest steeping in ordinary practice and produces the most concentrated sweet extraction of any.

Tea types it suits

Care and maintenance

Rinse the filter before the leaf dries into it. Nothing here needs detergent, and unglazed bodies should never meet any.

Other brewing vessels

Sources

This page is TeaHQ synthesis. No external source stands behind the description, the material or the account of how the object is cared for. Where the record names a tradition, that attribution is TeaHQ’s own reading of common practice rather than a citation.

How TeaHQ handles sources

TeaHQ names no maker, brand or shop and has nothing to sell. Nothing on this page should be read as advice to buy the object — the substitute note above exists because owning it is usually optional.

Written comparisons

Where TeaHQ has set this piece of teaware against something it is routinely confused with, and argued the differences out in full.

  • Houhin vs shiboridashi — Two handleless Japanese vessels for the highest grades of shaded green tea, distinguished by how the liquor is separated from the leaf. A houhin has an integral filter; a shiboridashi squeezes the tea out through a gap or a set of ridges moulded into the body.
  • Kyusu vs houhin — The Japanese teapot and its handleless small relative, and the difference between them is a temperature. A houhin has no handle because it is used at water temperatures low enough that the body can be held, which tells you immediately what it is for.