pu-erh , grinding ???

I'm afraid that would make it considerably more bitter. That's assuming you have ordered raw/green/sheng Pu'er, not cooked/black/shu. If you have the latter, bitterness might not be much of an issue. In any case getting more flavor out of the leaves isn't usually a problem; many people find Pu'er too strong, if anything.

Then maybe you'd like to introduce yourself to it gently?

/Lew

I would also suppose that pulverizing the leaf would ruin one of the great aspects of puer, which is that you can brew the same leaves over and over and get a whole bunch of different cups of tea with just a few grams of leaf. You can do the same with oolong, but puer tends to have more staying power in my experience. With tea dust, as you find in tea bags or finely chopped leaves even, I think the flavors would leach out much more quickly and you wouldn't get nearly as much enjoyment or value out of the tea.

cha bing

You could use one of these:

There's a good demo of this tool in Miyazaki's extraordinary movie "Spirited Away."

-DM

Ah, thanks for reminding me of _Spirited Away_! Just thinking about it makes me smile.

By the way, there's a memorable tea scene in that movie - *everything* in that movie is memorable - though it isn't Japanese tea. Charles: I don't know if there's enough tea in the movie for your purposes, but sheer greatness has to count, no?

/Lew

I just have to pop in to say that Hayao Miyazaki is pure genius. I own his entire library as well as anything put out by Studio Ghibli. Spirited Away is amazing. Some other of note for anyone interested: Grave of the Fireflies, Howl's Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke, Porco Rosso, and Nausicaa. Also Metropolis is another great Anime.

- Dominic

Yes, good Miyazaki is very much like a good tea - spiritually fulfilling in the kindest way. I collect his works as well, and have some very rare stuff on DVD (e.g, Future Boy Conan, Marco, and his music video "On Your Mark"). I even have his son's first Studio Ghibli film, Tales of Earthsea.

The tool shown in the photo matches one described in Lu Yu's Ch'a Ching, used to grind tea leaves for the Tang Dynasty style tea.