Curing Yixing teapots

Does the phase of the moon have any part in that?

JB

I guess you still have no clue what Gung-Fu is about. Well... Ignorance is bliss, right? And to answer your question -- phase of the moon has no part in that.

Sorry for stepping on your toes, no offence intended. But if you look at all the proposed steps you have in mind I cannot see how the surface or structure of the pot would be changed in any way.

JB

According to the author when the teapot is hot, it expands and breaks the air cavities within the clay. The freezing process froze the minute clay particles within the air cavities and the repeated expansion and contraction process forces these clay particles out of the air cavities, thereby clearing it. The last step of boiling the pot for 3 hours in tea allows the emptied air cavities to absorbed tea particles which helps in cultivating the teapot and at the same time removed clay smell.

The pot would have been fired at more than 1000 centigrade, fusing the kaolin particles to form the earthenware or porcelain. There may be a few loose kaolin particles still around as some surface dust. Kaolin is aluminium silicate, has no taste and is not toxic in these small amounts. The pot will adsorb some tea substances with time, the patina. I could not find a difference in taste after removing this patina. Probably, if you brewed coffee in the pot you would have a strong effect.

JB

The point of the exercise is to increase porosity a feature that significantly contributes to proper evolution from a newly-made vessel to a superbly-seasoned masterpiece. Due to the dynamics of porosity, the actual amount of exposed interior clay surface is many times larger than the pot's visual size. Accordingly, the flavor influence remaining form liquids prepared in the pot is unexpectedly effective. Moreover, permeating capillary and absorptive action intensify this influence creating in the fully-seasoned pot an environment that has the potential of radically changing the prepared tea's flavor characteristics.

I must admit that I find this method a bit scary. It seems that the pot would be under great stress as it shifts from boiling to sub-zero temperatures. Since I've shifted to buying named artisan pots I've become rather cautious about trying new curing methods. I do have a few cheaper pots that I'd consider trying this on though. Frankly, I'm not certain that I could tell the difference between this method and the one I'm using now.

What method are you using?

Cameron snipped-for-privacy@posting.google.com12/23/03

Which is?

Michael

My method.

1. Pot is lightly scrubbed with a nylon bristle brush to remove loose particles.

1. Pot is placed in a pot of distilled water at room temp and slowly raised to a rolling boil. After a few hours the pot is removed and allowed to cool. Note: I line the bottom of the pot with a few layers of cheesecloth to avoid damage from rattling around. I use distilled water because of my hypothesis that it makes a better solvent for the "clay smell".

2. Pot is put into a new pot of water and simmered all day.

1. I shut off the heat and add tea, of the variety to be used in it later, to the pot. I think that long boiling with tea releases unpleasant aromas into pot and prefer to steep it.

2. I repeat steps 3 and 4 several times. By this point the clay smell has always been gone, but the teapot requires further seasoning.

1. I fill the pot with leaf and add about a teaspoon of water, put the pot into a casserole dish, cover, and put in the oven. I bake the dish and pot together at around 300F for a few hours and then let it cool and sit for a day. As far as I know, this method is unique to me.

2. I make tea with the baked leaves and let the spent leaves sit in the pot for another day.

I repeat steps 6 and 7 until the pot distinctly acquires the fragrance of the tea. I've used the baking method on two pots so far without causing any damage. It really amplifies the character of the tea brewed in the pot. As always YMMV.

Cameron

I completely agree with everything you say. BUT, I have an issue with methods which are "unique". The culture which had been using Yixing teapots for leaf infusion for at list 700 years has traditional (tested by time) methods, we should follow them instead of inventing our own.

Even if they work? Your opinion is quite hopelessly and irrationally conservative. I see no reason why traditional methods must necessarily be the best methods. Clearly the Chinese experimented a great deal amongst themselves, as can be determined by a wide variation in styles of tea preparation over time and by region. If the Chinese accepted your logic they would still be whisking powdered-tea in bowls as they did in the Song dynasty and would not use teapots at all. If they honoured still older traditions they would simply eat the leaves as opposed to infusing them. All old and venerable traditions are preceded by yet older and more venerable ones (accepting, of course, the impossibility of infinite regress in this case).

Regards,

Cameron

Yuriy snipped-for-privacy@posting.google.com12/28/03

Yuri, I don't know. Traditions are fluid and in flux; it's only from the perspective of Now that we think there is something static and unchanging about them. Anyway, that's my humble opinion.

If the truth be known, I've never really bothered to cure one at all. I just let nature take its course. The up side of this I suppose is that I can cure along with the pot. But the down side is that I ruin a lot of tea. And lately I've been buying better oolongs, so I'll probably start curing the pots with some ceremony, rereading Cameron's (and others') posts as his reasoning is sound, I think.

Michael

Hehe, guilty as charged :) I AM hopelessly conservative.