Gaiwans have won

I imagine the teas you find requiring you to decant the liquor are greens, right?

I think it's always worthwhile pouring off the liquor from the gaiwan when it's done. That way, you get to drink it exactly the way you want. The only time I drink from the brewing vessel is when I'm using a travel brewer, like those double-walled Chinese glass things, and that's a compromise.

I use gaiwans the great majority of the time, but I think there are some valuable effects you can get from some teas only with an unglazed (Yixing) teapot.

/Lew

Yes, mainly the Japanese greens and a few oolongs need poured off to keep the perfect flavor, but some greens and the yellows are pretty tolerant of being left in and drank reasonably fast. BLC depends on the type as to what's best and any green that gets very bitter needs poured off, but Tai Ping Hou Kui, Dragonwell, Huo Shan Huang Ya, tightly rolled BLC, and a bunch of other more mellow Chinese greens can stay in. Kudingcha comes out, but I do prefer it in my gaiwan too ;)

Which teas do you find come out best from the Yixing? I've found I still like my jasmine green from Yixing (so wrong, but so right), anything that really shines from tons of leaf and quick brewing, cooked Puerh, some Shui Xian, and the Teaspring Song Zhong Dan Cong which comes out peachy and smooth and almost buttery.

- Dominic

When I want to push an oolong hard without the liquor getting too harsh, I find it helps. Similarly, a young raw Pu'er can be softened by an unglazed pot. Not that this is the only good way to brew either of these types of tea...

/Lew

Youre just about there if you use the Gaiwan for Brewing AND Tasting ie no need to remove the leaves. You have to let them cool down before touching or become adept at handling the saucer. Still you cant see through the lid for color or leaf. I verified on a recent expedition to a mall store which carries the complete line of Bodum double walled glasses are still made of pyrex not plastic. The 9oz Pavina is perfect for tea and boiling water. I couldnt avoid the empty Teavana. I bought some Yixing mugs that look good enough to eat.

Jim

PS All my Japanese teas > I've been an on-again-off-again user of various gaiwans

...forget the pot...

I actually went back to that Borders a month or so ago just because of our conversation on the plastic one and the ones out for sale were indeed glass but they had a bunch of sets of plastic ones in the back for teapot service. I'm guessing they are either a food service-only type thing, or somehow got mixed up (on purpose or not) with the Bodums. They are double walled and most certainly plastic. Of course the high-school girl behind the counter had no idea nor cared.

- Dominic

The glass Pavina wouldnt last too long in a Food service. ill keep my eyes out for the plastic. I could use them in a car or rolling around in the paneers of my bike. This summer ill make sun tea for biking, throw some leaf in a bottle, add cold water and let nature takes it course.

Jim

How much water do you heat up at a time and how do you keep it hot? I almost never use gaiwan lately because it's too much hassle to go to the kitchen and heat up more water and I don't like the taste of water boiled with an electric kettle.. other than that I'd love to use gaiwans more often. I end up only drinking blacks, greens and yellows because of this. -ak

Often I do use an electric kettle, one of which has a temp hold feature and one that does not. At work I use the water cooler/heater which is a local PA spring water and I turn the thermostat all the way up so I get ~195-200 degrees. I actually don't heat and reheat the water very often, in fact because I drink many teas that take lower temps i make the first brew and then just make subsequent brews with the water at whatever temp it remains to be. Many swear by adding heat for each subsequent brew, but with greens I find that it's not really necessary for many... the descending heat does just fine, I may up the steep time a bit but that's all. Yellows also do great like this.

Same thing could be done with a kettle on the stove, heat it up once and keep using it. I often give the same treatment to oolongs and blacks without a major issue. There is an art to it that took me a while to perfect and to match to my tastes but it can be done with a little effort. The big thing is to find a kettle that keeps the heat really well or I'd imagine you could pour off to a nice glass vacuum thermos and use that for each brewing after the first.

- Dominic

That's pretty much what I've tried to do many times but it's always a bit off. I mean, if I heat up about 4 gaiwans worth (I have a very small gaiwan), then it's perfect but then I have to heat up the kettle once again.. Basically, it comes down to spending ~7 minutes to make a 3-cup pot vs. spending at least ~45 minutes hanging around the kitchen, heating kettle 2-3 times, timing the infusions right, and drinking the tea leasurely. I could speed the whole thing up but then I have to drink it too fast and that's no fun. If I could work in the kitchen on the laptop, I would probably adjust eventually, but I hate the laptop's keyboard.

What I end up doing is this: I have two 3-cup glass pots and I brew in one of them, with no infuser, and then decant into the second one. I have to say I was never able to make greens and yellows in a gaiwan as nicely as I get them with this method, although I haven't tried that many times. But.. it's just hard to imagine that it's possible to make better green, yellow and black tea than that - very often it comes out just perfect; I do like light tea--I think part of the advantage of a gaiwan is that it's possible to make much stronger tea without adding too much astringency and sourness; but light tea suits me even better.

So, my only problem is oolongs and puerhs. The funny thing is that I keep buying them and I do like them so they just keep accumulating and... it's a good thing that they don't go stale! (well, greener oolongs might..). But I found that I can make green oolongs quite nicely with glass pots, too, with less leaf and longer infusions.

What I really need is one of those butane portable burners they sell in some stores in chinatown. I saw one for only $15 and I'm still kicking myself that I didn't get it back then.. That will solve my puerh and oolong problem! -ak

Oh, well maybe we are on two different pages. Let me step back and kind of qualify what I was saying. For me 3-4 gaiwans is what I am aiming for in a typical brewing, not speed or volume which may be more of where I misunderstood your initial question. I can probably get 4-5 gaiwans brewed with one heated pot of water, so probably 400-600ml (14-20oz.) of tea which doesn't really require any time investment beyond the initial "boil" of maybe 5-7 minutes and a couple trips back to the kettle for more water. At most I might reheat the water once more or heat a fresh pot to boil for the last rounds or if I've spread it out over a longer time period and the water has cooled.

Something like a Zojirushi small-mid sized kettle might work for you if you can get past the aversion to electric heat as they can be set and keep the water at the right temp and there is no "wasted" time or effort. I can't see butane being preferable to electric as it is going to possibly impart an actual taste or at least fumes which aren't the most pleasant.

I don't do a ton of Puerh or green oolongs and when I do those tend not to find their way to my gaiwan anyhow. That's mostly the domain of Yixing for me. It took me a considerable amount of time to finally settle on my gaiwans and to proclaim that they have "won." I struggled and went back and forth over time, but for me they finally proved to be the best balance of all aspects and even exceled in a few. My best suggestion would be to not force it and just find your own sweet spot, they may not be for everyone and it may take time to finally click.

- Dominic

I have a gaiwan that's about 1.5-2oz, that might be part of the reason why it's more labour intensive, but I feel there's an advantage, too, because you can fill it up with enough leaf that when it expands, it fills the whole volume and I think that keeps flavor from getting stale longer between rounds of infusion. That's another thing I know people do with gaiwans but I was never able to - leaving them for a relatively long time (i.e. longer than 20mins) between rounds of infusion, that is to say, first a few infusions out of the first boiled kettle, then some interval longer than 20mins, then a few more infusions

- and so on: for me, I begin to notice a very, very tiny change of taste after about 20 minutes passing (unless I keep making new infusions).

Actually now that I think about it, a larger gaiwan may keep it there longer..

I got a Zoji, but it's even worse than a regular electric pot. I suspect it's because of slow heating, or maybe because of teflon. It was a waste of $120, and by far the most expensive failed tea experiment for me (unless you add up all the teas that turned out lousy). Come to think of it, my issue with the regular electric kettle may be because of the bright, chrome-covered steel on the inside, my regular kettle is a le creuset with enamel coating and it works great, I've also had very good results with a cheap whistler glass kettle, and I suspect the issue with electric kettle is a consequence of water boiled in it having a slight metallic (bright) taste. If you lick a chromed metal surface you'll get the same taste, but not for enamel covered steel, and of course not glass.

I had an idea that if I run about a thousand or maybe 500 cycles of water through the kettle, the steel will wear down and the taste will improve, but that's a lot of electricty wasted, so I might try doing that to prep water when cooking.

So green pu-erhs work out better in yixings? Really? I somehow thought that darker ones would work better in them. In my experience with yixings it's too easy to overheat teas in them, and greener oolongs I've had are not very tolerant of overheating.

How about "silver needle" puerhs - yixings or gaiwans? I only tried them in regular glass pots so far, and they work great. I think of them as lighter oolongs even though I've heard they're really green cakes puerhs.

-ak (rainy)

Heh, once again I now realize I didn't specify well... I was meaning cooked Puerhs. I'm personally not a big fan of uncooked (well I'm not a huge fan at all, but occasionally try some cooked when the mood strikes) I do uncooked puerh in my gaiwan exclusively if/when I do drink it. Most gong fu is done with greener oolongs and various roasted green oolongs. I've never had a silver needle puerh, so that I have no comment on. I'm not a white tea fan so even regular silver needles gets very little time from me. I like the darker more robust teas in yixing, it can bring out notes other methods subdue and it can mellow out some other notes.

- Dominic

I think 'silver needle' mostly refers to the looks of the leaves, flavour is something quite different from white teas (by the way, we have the opposite tastes in tea - white silver needles is my all-time favorite over anything else!). The silver needle puerh might be even closer to golden yunnan in taste, but is very different from that, too, especially in the sense that it never sours like golden yunnans tend to.

I've tried many, many puerhs, but I don't know how many of them were cooked, a lot of times sellers don't specify that and I don't know how to tell. -ak (rainy)