This is marginally on-topic, but a lot of people here seem to be interested in ceramics. There's a wonderfully twisted story by Jack Vance call The Potters of Firsk (mis-spelled in one of the URLs below) that I've shared with some other wheel-throwing friends. Unfortunately, collections in which it appears may be hard to find, and there doesn't seem to be a text version on the Web. But I did find it as a radio drama, linked here:
One may only imagine the perverse pleasure of drinking tea out of such radiant vessels, a kind of posthumous refinement of classic orange Fiestaware (about which, I have personally confirmed, the rumors are true).
ObTea - with the belated arrival of torrid days, I've been brewing mostly at room temperature after sunrise. After trying a range of shu and sheng Pu'er, mostly with pots packed as for gongfu, early observations include:
- The terpenic taste people often describe as "camphor" is much more pronounced than with hot-brewing of the same teas. The note some of us experience as umeboshi/plum (or sometimes cherry cola) is entirely absent.
- Unlike rough greens and astringent Darjeelings, sheng Pu'er does not seem to me to gain any smoothness by coldfu brewing.
- Shengs do not go on forever, which was a real surprise. These are steeps of 1 minute stretching out to hours, and apparently there's a more or less temperature-independent aspect to the extraction.
- Though many nice parts of the profile carry through, I have not found the overall pleasure of either cooked or raw Pu'er prepared this way to be remotely comparable to usual gongful results. In marked distinction, many greens and oolongs I've tried are wonderful when so managed, and (to my taste) rough Darjeelings are at their best.
-DM