Posted By teaskeptic on April 29, 2009
Yixing pots are one of the tea areas most in need of skepticism. I, like many other tea nuts, am often caught trying to justify their use and purchase by claims that they make better tea. This is what I have been experimenting with over the last few days.
The Test
The method of testing is pretty simple.
You’ll need: gaiwan, faircup, 2 identical cups, a piece of tape and a yixing pot
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Put a small piece of tape under one of the cups, this is the cup that will hold the liquid from the yixing pot.
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Pick a tea and brew it like you normally would, in the gaiwan. Pour the tea into the faircup when it’s ready.
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Brew a second infusion and add that to the faircup, mixing the first two infusions.
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Pour half of the tea from the faircup into the yixing pot.
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I usually pause here for a few moments so that the yixing pot can work its magic.
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- Next, pour the tea from the yixing into the taped cup, and pour the tea from the faircup into the other cup.
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Now shuffle the two cups around. Try to distract yourself so that you no longer know which cup is which.
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Smell the aroma from each cup. Drink from the cups. Pay attention!
The taping and shuffling of the cups makes the test a little more blind, for those of us that don’t trust ourselves. I’ve read of people doing variations of this on teachat, and when I visited the Tea Gallery last December, Michael did the same thing to a pot (belonging to Toki, I think) with pretty obvious results.
Points to consider
You’ll have to play around with the preheating of the vessels so that the two cups are at the same temperature when you’re ready to drink from them. Otherwise, you’ll have two cups at different temperatures and this will definitely skew your results. The hotter tea will be more aromatic, less mouthfeel, etc…
My Results
I’ve been doing this on and off with 3 or 4 pots of mine. These pots are around a year old, some of which have seen more action than others. Teas I tried the test with were a Da Hong Pao, an Oriental Beauty, some roasted Tie Guan Yins and a wet stored puerh.
Pass or Fail?
Well… both.
First of all, the test is a success in the sense that I was pretty consistently able to identify which cup came from the yixing. While the differences were pretty subtle, I was pretty surprised by them.
However, just because I was able to taste a difference doesn’t necessarily mean I preferred the taste of the tea that came from the yixing. In fact, I almost always preferred the non-yixing cup.
What I found (and what seems to be case with most people) is that the yixing tends to take away the edges of the tea, creating a rounder, more balanced taste. Another thing I found, is that I tend to enjoy those edges and don’t necessarily want them stripped away. In particular, for the Da Hong Pao and the Tie Guan Yins, I prefered the cup that came straight from the faircup. The edges helped define the flavor in these teas and I liked that. The opposite is true of the OB and the wet puerh. For the OB, I enjoyed the rounder flavor as this particular tea was a bit finnicky, and often has a bit of bitterness to it. As for the wet stored puerh, some of the wet flavor was removed and that is a good thing, for me.
Conclusion
I’m not sure how I feel about these results. It seems like the better the tea, the less need there is to use a yixing pot. As for flawed teas, a pot seems to balance them out and make them sit up straight, so to speak. Maybe my pots just need more seasoning. I was sometimes able to taste the pot in the tea I was drinking, which is probably a good argument for more seasoning. Yeah, I guess that must be it.
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