Teapots

I'm interested in purchasing a starter teapot. Does anyone know what's the best type of pot to buy.

I've found several interesting ones on

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Love the look of the Staub Cast Iron, but would like to see the tea. So is glass, porcelean or cast iron better. .

Reply to
erin jackson
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I strongly recommend, if you have only one teaport, that you get the Chatsford teapot in vitrified hotelware, which Upton's sells.

The spot is well-shaped and does not drip, and the hotelware is much more difficult to break than glass, spatterware or porcelain. It is not phenomenally elegant, but it is practical and reasonably priced.

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

You will probably end up owning more than one pot, and more than one person will tell you to buy a Chatsford. Sometimes i wonder if someone has an endorsement contract or something.

Cast iron pots are traditional for some japanese teas and have their advantages but they also demand more maintenance. I have a small Kafuh tetsubin i use from time to time.

Some will disagree with me but i don't believe there is anything at all wrong with glass.

The decisive factors are going to be how well it pours, how easy it is to clean, and whether the infuser design works the way you want it to. There are pots good and bad in all available materials.

As for how well the spout pours, that's hard to determine visually. It's something about how the lip on the end is formed. The only pot I've had trouble with was more of a pitcher than a pot, and didn't have a regular spout as such.

Don't personally own any porcelain pots, just various glass and metal.

Reply to
Eric Jorgensen

I don't have an endorsement contract, but I did drop a Chatsford hotelware pot ten feet onto concrete and it didn't break. Since I drop things a lot, that's a big deal.

Needless to say the bone china ware is probably not so rugged.

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

As a starter I'd prefer something convenient rather than fancy. Try IngenuiTEA at

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Reply to
aloninna

Glass is better for viewing & easy cleaning - doesn't retain flavors and aromas - just rinse, maybe a light brushing, with hot water.

Porcelain is better for heat retention - stains, flavors and aromas are removed easily enough with a solution of baking soda and hot water and a bit of brushing.

Iron is better for ...? Hmm...in general, metal dissipates heat faster than earthenware and some swear that a metallic taste is added to the brew although I don't know about cast iron in particular. May need to use a potholder since metal handles are typically significantly hotter than glass or porcelain.

Personally, since I'm a huge fan of both glass and Chatsford teapots, I recommend either of those. One thing to consider if you're looking at Jenaer teapots, is that they discontinued production this past March and won't be available after the current stock is sold.

HTH.

Reply to
Bluesea

Something! Those fine mesh infusers make brewing loose tea and clean-up super-easy and the wide variety of design/size/material choices suit just about everybody.

Reply to
Bluesea

A proper tetsubin is porcelain glazed on the inside, and should add no more flavor to your tea than a porcelain pot. It's typically a black glaze.

Metal does dissipate heat faster. The point of the cast iron pot, however, is that you can pre-heat the pot by filling it with boiling water for a few minutes, then dumping that water, adding the tea, and steeping.

Which will change the way the tea steeps and generally requires a shorter steep time, fwiw, since the hot water loses less heat to the pre-heated pot.

The cast iron has enough thermal mass that the pot will still be hot to the touch 15 or more minutes later, so if you're going to be drinking the tea over time you should steep with a bag or infuser (infuser should come with the pot) and remove the tea after steeping.

Properly pre-heated, tea in my tetsubin stays hot far longer than tea in any of my glass pots.

I do have one stainless steel pot, but the spout leaks so i haven't used it yet. I know how to repair it, I just need a round tuit. I imagine it loses heat very quickly. On the other hand, it certainly wouldn't object to being placed over a candle-type warmer.

Oh, fwiw, never apply direct heat to a cast iron teapot. It will ruin the finish. Only heat it by filling it with hot water. An electric mug warmer would also be fine. No stove, no oven, no candles.

Always dry them thoroughly and allow them to sit upside-down with the lid off in a warm, dry place for a few hours after use. The bits around the openings where the glaze on the inside meets the patina on the outside can rust up fairly quickly if the pot is lidded directly after hand-drying. Humid air inside the pot will condense.

Never, ever, under any circumstances, clean any cast iron in a dishwasher. Not even glazed LeCruisette cookware. Always hand wash. And in the case of a tetsubin (and most bare cast iron cookware as well), don't use any soap or detergent of any kind unless you actually need to. Go ahead and use soap on enameled iron cookware, but dry it on the stove like any other iron cookware.

- Eric "Cast Iron Chef" Jorgensen

Reply to
Eric Jorgensen

Clearly, this is not the kind to get:

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--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

Thanks for the good info.

I thought preheating is SOP for all teapots (except the IngenuiTea) but this sounds like you don't preheat your glass pots. Have you compared preheated glass to preheated metal? I know that glass doesn't retain heat as well as ceramic so wouldn't expect your tetsubin to be better than glass.

Reply to
Bluesea

You mean this one?

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Reply to
Eric Jorgensen

Ceramic is a better insulator than glass and a better insulator than iron.

HOWEVER.

Most glass pots are borosilicate, most tetsubin are gray cast iron.

Thermal properties thereof:

Borosilicate Glass:

Mean Specific Heat: 910 Joules per kilogram-kelvin Mean Thermal Conductivity: 1.3 Watts per Meter-Kelvin Density: 2.23 Grams per Cubic Centimeter

Gray Cast Iron:

Mean Specific Heat: 440 Joules per kilogram-kelvin Mean Thermal Conductivity: 80.2 Watts per Meter-Kelvin Density: 7.87 Grams per Cubic Centimeter

Specific heat is defined as the amount of heat, expressed here in Joules, per unit of mass required to raise the temperature one degree kelvin.

With respect to the ability of a given solid to retain heat, it is generally accepted that solids release heat at the same rate they absorb it, all things being equal, and assuming spherical horses on an infinite plane.

Radiation and conduction have their effects, but lets assume for the moment that the air is still and both pots sit on an asbestos trivet.

Air, treated as either a fluid or a gas, in general, is a slightly better insulator than glass, it just has wacky-variable density determined by heat and pressure.

If you want to figure out the convection due to expansion of air heated both by conduction and radiation, I can give you some numbers to work with, but you'll never finish working out the math without setting up a cluster of computers to model the currents of heated air through the unheated air. And I'm pretty sure that granted the similar surface area of the pots, the margin of difference in dissipation we're dealing with renders those results largely meaningless.

Thermal conductivity here is expressed as the heat flow rate (measured in watts) times the distance divided by an area per temperature gradient, in this case meters per degrees kelvin. This is how fast heat moves through a solid.

Density, of course, is expressed here as how much it weighs vs. how big it is.

So we can see that given an equivalent mass, it takes twice as much heat to bring the glass pot up to temperature, but it also holds on to that heat twice as long.

Additionally, an equivalent mass of iron will transmit heat throughout it's volume more than 60 times faster than borosilicate glass.

The thermal conductivity of the glass does in fact class it as an insulator where the iron is considered a good conductor of heat.

And you can see that the iron is significantly more dense than the glass. Moreover, a typical borosilicate pot has very thin walls - 1mm or less - whereas a typical tetsubin has wall thickness varying from 3 to 5mm.

My 600cc tetsubin - including handle - weighs 1359 grams, without infuser or lid.

My 600cc borosilicate glass pot, without infuser or lid, but with integrated handle, weighs 225 grams.

Both pots have a spout roughly 1.5 inches in length, with similar diameter. The tetsubin is slightly more squat than the borosilicate pot.

For the sake of inquisition, the handle on the tetsubin is a long front-to-back loop of steel that probably weighs 150 grams or more on it's own, and the handle on the glass pot is a small side loop that probably weighs several grams.

So for the sake of argument, lets be generous and say that the tetsubin weighs 1.2kg.

For what it's worth, the thermal interface between the steel handle and the cast iron vessel is quite small and quite poor, and the handle never even gets warm.

THEREFORE:

Heated to the same temperature, and very roughly speaking, my borosilicate glass pot is worth about 205 joules, and my tetsubin is worth about 528 joules.

So, from the numbers above we can infer a few things.

1: A cast iron pot with a mass similar to the borosilicate pot would be bloody worthless, having quite poor thermal mass and leaking heat to everything that touches it. It would probably also be quite flimsy, as it would have to have much thinner walls. Something like an inflated balloon. 2: The truth is that with almost 5 times the mass, even though it's got half the heat, gram for gram, it's still got more than two and a half times the stored energy to go around. 3: A borosilicate glass pot with a mass similar to the iron for an equal interior volume would be superior to the iron, but would have walls almost 1cm thick, and take a very long time to preheat. 4: A similar mass of aluminum, pre-heated, with a specific heat of 900 k/kg-k would have them both beat. But it would have absurdly thick walls, and the available array of anodized colors would be no match for the earthy aesthetics of cast iron with a good patina, or the simple serenity of a well formed glass semi-sphere. 5: A similar mass of 440 stainless steel, with a specific heat of 460, a thermal conductivity of 24, and a density of 7.65, would heat slower than the iron but hold the heat about the same. It would unfortunately be prohibitively hard to make, and as such most stainless pots have significantly less mass than their cast iron brethren.

Thus, it is both my considered opinion and my observation that while preheating a paper-thin borosilicate glass pot is almost entirely pointless, pre-heating a cast iron pot before steeping is not only beneficial but required.

Pyrex, fwiw, has a similar specific temperature and poorer conductivity as compared to borosilicate.

And furthermore, owing to the greater thermal mass in the iron, and assuming a poor thermal interface with the trivet, tea inside a preheated tetsubin will stay hot roughly twice as long as tea inside a preheated borosilicate pot.

QED.

Anybody got numbers for the specific heat, thermal conductivity, and density of popular ceramics?

Reply to
Eric Jorgensen

If you are worried about heat retention of a vessel, and you want to keep the heat within the teapot for a long time, go for a thermoflask, made of glass (it will be coated with reflective aluminium layers within the vacuum space).

JB

Reply to
danube

tools of the trade !the perfect set! for your greens and whites--use a guywan to keep temp down. oolongs -- use clay/yixing. blacks -- porcelain ofcourselain. pu-erhs -- stoneware. flower/herb/flavored -- glass (Schott Jena Glas) this is good german glass and wont break.

icetea anyone have any other combos

Reply to
icetea

if we look at the tried and tested teapots, we find good reason for the choice of vessel used, porcelain will be used for teas that taste better at lower temperatures and is just so happens it dissipates heat quick. Also high brewing temperature black tea is best brewed in clay pots because they hold the heat, excluding the english who just love porcelain or silver for brewing everything. trial and error is how a tea student approaches a new pot that will be used for their examinations/or tea tasting. they will experiment with amount of tea, time, and temp. of water (initial time) when we approach this question infusion vessels, some times the empirical data is not what was expected from a theoretical model this is an interesting discussion, the science of tea brewing, as opposed to the art of tea brewing.

icetea

Reply to
icetea

How traditional and for what teas? In all my years living in Japan, I never once saw someone use a tetsubin for brewing tea. Boiling water, yes. But not brewing. Those porcelain-glaze on the inside tetsubin that were all the rage here in the US some years back seem exclusively an export item. Sort of like those enormous "Kamado" barbecues that Playboy-age, swinging suburbanites took a shine to in the 60's and 70's. An amusing comparison, as these were ceramic glazed:

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--crymad

Reply to
crymad

I didn't know you could buy eggs of godzilla. They already have an importator for Japan ?

Kuri

Reply to
kuri

I prefer stainless steel vacuum bottles. Which i also pre-heat.

Why? More durable, and if you get the Thermos-Nissan variant, superior vacuum anyway. There is thermal contact at the neck, but not very much.

Reply to
Eric Jorgensen

I use a small 1-person pot made by Beehouse, a Japanese company. I think Adagio carries it also.

Also have an IngenuiTEA, but like the teapot better. Mostly because I don't have a teacup/mug large enough to hold the tea after it's steeped in the IngenuiTEA.

L
Reply to
Lara Burton

Hey, my husband bought me a Kamado. Love it. Excellent roast chicken, smoked tri-tip, pulled pork . . .

L
Reply to
Lara Burton

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