Notes from Vessel: A Gathering of Clay, Craft & Ceremony. Part Two.
Part one closed on a question to put to a piece of teaware: what tea wants to be brewed in you?
Ask it and a second question arrives right behind it, because you cannot pick up a vessel without also deciding how you will brew in it. The pot and the method get chosen together. You can own exactly the right clay for a tea and still hand yourself a worse bowl by brewing it the wrong way inside it.
What follows comes out of the five classes Colin taught over the first weekend of Vessel. Part one was about what a vessel does to the tea. This is about method, element, and heat.
Four Ways to Brew
There are four methods in common use and none of them is the correct one. They suit different teas, different seasons, different numbers of people, and different things you might be trying to build in yourself.
Leaves in a Bowl
The simplest method and the place to begin. Leaves, hot water, a bowl, nothing between you and the tea.
You give up control when you brew this way, and that is the point of it. The leaves keep steeping the whole time, so the tea shifts under you as you drink. An open bowl also loses heat quickly, which means the tea cools as the session goes, and for some teas that cooling is part of what they do. If you leave it too long it will turn bitter, and there is no rescuing it once it has.
What the method builds is equanimity. You sit with what is in front of you and you leave it alone. That sounds like a small thing until you try to do it for twenty minutes without reaching for anything.
Bowl tea also scales. One bowl and a kettle will serve a room of people who would never fit around a gongfu table.
Side Handle into a Bowl
More control than a bowl and less than gongfu. The pot holds the leaves and you pour, so you decide when the tea leaves the water instead of letting it keep going.
That single decision is most of the difference. You can pull a tea at the moment it is right and hold the rest back for the next pour. Some teas want this and refuse almost everything else, particularly ones that turn bitter fast but have more to give across several pours.
It also suits a few people rather than a room. Enough control to brew well, little enough equipment that nobody at the table feels they are watching a demonstration.
Boiled Tea
The leaves sit in a long boil instead of a series of pours. A large pot, a ladle, and time. Historically the ladle was a squash gourd fixed to a bamboo branch, and in southern Yunnan the same pot often held Chinese herbs alongside the tea.
This asks a lot of the leaf. A tea has to withstand sitting in a rolling boil for an hour, two hours, sometimes three, which most teas cannot do. Shou puerh handles it. So do the Hunanese and Sichuanese dark teas. Hard mushrooms belong here too, chaga and turkey tail and reishi, along with roots like astragalus, all of which need long heat to give anything up at all. Some traditions add a little salt or a little oil.
What you get is transformation, depth, and warmth, and a pot that serves a crowd without anyone tending it. Less control than any other method, and more people fed.
Gongfu Cha
The most variables and the most control. Leaf weight, water temperature, pour speed, steep time, whether you preheated the wares, which clay you chose. Every one of them is a dial, and gongfu is the method that hands you all of them at once.
That is why it is often described as advanced, which is not quite right. It is more involved, not more advanced, and nobody has to earn their way to it. If you find a pot you love, brew in it.
What the method builds is sensitivity. You start noticing differences you could not detect a year earlier, and then differences smaller than those. The scale of what registers keeps shrinking.
Gongfu wants five people or fewer. Past that you lose control of the variables that were the reason to brew gongfu in the first place, and the better move is to stop chasing precision and be with the people instead.
The Gaiwan
The gaiwan belongs to gongfu as much as a zisha pot does. It just comes down a different line of the tradition, and whether you were taught it depends on the lineage you learned in.
You brew in the gaiwan, pour into a fairness pitcher, then pour from the pitcher into cups. The odd thing about it is that a gaiwan is a bowl you pour from, which puts it at both ends of this list at once.
Young sheng puerh in a porcelain gaiwan does something no other vessel manages. If you drink young sheng and have never tried it that way, that is the experiment to run first.
Drinking straight from the gaiwan, lifting the lid and sipping past it, is a different thing. In Taiwan it is called kitchen tea. It works, and people who like it should keep doing it, but it tends to overbrew and the vessel gets uncomfortable to hold.
Choosing Between Them
Some teas will not brew a given way at all. It comes out thin, or bitter, or closed, and adjusting the leaf and the temperature does not rescue it. That is the tea telling you to change the method rather than the dose.
Much of the rest is arithmetic about people. A bowl serves a room and so does a long boil. A side handle suits a few. Gongfu wants five or fewer.
And some of it is what you want the session to be. Is this a tea for stillness, for sitting quietly with something and letting it change on its own? Or is it a tea that wants to be brewed skillfully, where precision is how you honor it? The first points at a bowl. The second points at gongfu. The answer moves with the season, the hour, and who is sitting with you.
The Vessel Through the Five Elements
The five elements are not literal. Fire is not only flame, and water is not only what is in the kettle. They are patterns, and each one turns into a different question you can ask a piece of teaware.
木 Wood, spring
Wood is upward movement, aroma, and emergence. The question is whether a vessel opens those or holds them in.
Thin porcelain gathers the volatile oils of a high-oil oolong and then lets them go, which is why aromatic oolongs are usually brewed in thin-walled wares. A heavy ware keeps them instead. Put a fine oolong in a thick, tank-like pot and the aromatics that were the reason to drink it never arrive.
火 Fire, summer
Fire is heat and presence. Heat is what wakes the leaf up, and roasting is what transformed it in the first place.
The question here is whether a vessel holds enough heat to open a roast without flattening the aroma or pulling too hard at the leaf. Enough heat, and not more than that. When the fire is too strong it burns things out, in a roast and in a person.
土 Earth, late summer
Earth is body, sweetness, and settling. This is where the heavier, heat-retentive clays belong, the ones with real mass to them.
Those clays absorb oils over time and soften the edges of a tea. The question to ask is not only what the vessel does to this pour, but what it is helping the tea become over years of use.
金 Metal, autumn
Metal is refinement and discernment. Minerals form in the dark, underground, under pressure, and the element carries that quality of something reduced to its essentials.
In practice it means breaking a method into parts so each part can be refined on its own. Small porcelain cups, precise pours, restraint. An iron kettle brings the metal element forward in a tea, pushing structure and woodiness up, which suits some teas and gets in the way of others.
水 Water, winter
Water is depth, storage, and surrender. Aged tea belongs here, and so does the long boil, where you stop steering and let time do the work.
The question is whether you can leave something alone. Some teas only give up what they have after a long time in heat, and no amount of attention speeds that up.
The Kettle and the Fire
What the water sits in and what heats it are two separate decisions, and both of them land in the tea.
The Kettle
Cast iron, clay, silver, and copper each hand you a different result from the same tea and the same water. So does stainless, which is usually the least interesting of them, and which is what most electric kettles are made of.
Age matters too. An old iron kettle behaves differently from a young one, and the one you use will change under you over the years as it seasons.
Kettles also absorb odor, cast iron especially. A kettle stored in a kitchen picks up cooking oils and spices the same way a porous pot does, and you will taste it. Keep it away from the stove and away from anything strongly scented.
The Fire
Electric kettles heat with rods in the base. Those rods get very hot very fast and agitate the water hard, and while they will get you to 190 degrees quickly, the water arrives rough. It is the most common way to heat water and the least kind to it.
Past that there is a whole range, and each option does something different: an induction plate, an infrared coil, an alcohol burner, a gas flame, a wood or charcoal fire. It also matters whether the heat surrounds the whole vessel or sits directly beneath it. Infrared warms the entire kettle. A flame concentrates under one point.
Charcoal makes the best water, and Japanese white charcoal is the best of the charcoals. It burns hotter and heats faster than most, and what comes out of a kettle over charcoal is noticeably better, provided the water was good to begin with. A great deal of charcoal on the market is made from coconut or longan husk and does not behave the same way. Laying charcoal so it burns evenly is a skill of its own, and getting it to catch at all can be the hard part.
The principle underneath all of it: the closer the heat is to how you would find it in nature, the better the tea.
Reading the Water
Watch how quickly the steam comes off. Listen for the pitch of the sound, and how strong it is. Look at the bubbles and notice whether they are sitting on the surface or rising in a stream of pearl.
There is no shortcut here. You watch it enough times and you begin to know, and eventually you will not need to look. People who have worked with one kettle for years can tell the temperature by sound alone, from another room.
A glass kettle is the easiest place to learn, because you can watch the whole thing happen. What you learn there carries over to clay and iron, where you cannot see anything at all.
A thermometer is worth using while you are learning, the same way a gram scale is worth using while you learn leaf weight. Both should become unnecessary.
What Is Dissolved in the Water
Good clean spring water will lift a tea immediately. The right water can take a mediocre tea and make it good, and that is easy enough to test in an afternoon.
The reverse is also true, and less obvious. Some water refuses to work with some tea. A local spring can produce a beautiful oolong and flatten a dark puerh completely, to the point where the leaves do not seem to open at all. The minerals are the reason. What is dissolved in the water interacts with what is in the leaf, and not every pairing works.
Water high in calcium or silica tends to come out rough. What you want is water that feels creamy, or milky, or silky, with a little sweetness to it. Too sweet is its own problem: some bottled water is sweet enough that it muddies a dark, earthy tea.
White rings inside a kettle or a pot are mineral deposits, mostly calcium and magnesium. A spring can be excellent and still leave them. The layer builds over time, and it is not good for the wares. It is also a sign your water is harder than you want it. No fire will rescue water that was wrong to begin with.
Temperature
The single most useful number in brewing is the one nobody tells you, so here it is as a starting point rather than a rule.
Lighter, more delicate, more floral teas want water around 185 to 190 degrees. As teas get darker, the temperature goes up. A dark shou puerh wants water just off the boil.
Aged tea wants more heat than its age might suggest. The longer a tea has been stored, the drier and more brittle the leaf becomes, and it takes more heat to draw the oils back out of it. This is also why aged teas run warm in the body, and why a thirty-year-old tea is a strange thing to reach for in August.
The dry leaf will tell you some of this before you brew. How the aroma comes off the leaf indicates how quickly it will release into the water, which in turn sets your temperature, your steep time, and how much leaf to use.
And when a tea comes out bitter, temperature is one of three places to look. Too much leaf, water too hot, or it sat too long. Work through them in that order before you blame the tea.
Preserving the Heat
Watch a gongfu session and it can look like fuss. The pot gets rinsed, the cups get rinsed, and rinsed again. Water gets poured out that no one drinks. Everything is warmed, emptied, warmed.
There is a logic under it. Some of the rinsing is cleaning. Most of it is heat.
The Four Foundations
The gongfu table has four necessary pieces: a zisha pot, the tea boat it sits in, the charcoal stove, and small porcelain cups. A flat tray and a jianshui for wastewater round it out, since you are rinsing constantly and the water has to go somewhere.
Each of the four is doing something. Zisha holds heat well and softens the water, which is most of why it suits gongfu. Good charcoal makes better water. Good high-quality porcelain softens the water again on its way into your mouth and brings out qualities a heavier cup would flatten.
Why It All Gets Rinsed
Heat carries qi, so the goal is to keep it from the kettle to the cup. The aim is steadiness rather than a peak, and a swing anywhere along the way shows up in the tea.
A cold cup is the last and worst place to lose it. You choose the leaf, the water, the pot, and the temperature, and then pour into something cold and give a portion of it away at the final moment. So the wares get rinsed with hot water. The pot gets preheated before the leaves go in. The tea boat gets emptied between pours so the pot is never sitting in water that has gone cold. The pours come quickly, because tea sitting in a pot is tea cooling in a pot.
There are smaller versions of the same move everywhere once you look. You roll a cup in your hands as you empty the rinse water so the heat reaches all of it rather than one side. You pour in small circles instead of straight down onto one spot, both to avoid scorching a single leaf and to warm the whole vessel evenly.
The cups get rinsed twice. The first cleans them, and it is a gesture of respect to the guest. The second comes immediately before brewing, because a warm cup makes better tea. One rinse for the guest, one for the heat.
The Hand on the Kettle
The kettle stays in the off hand. If you are right-handed you learn to pour with the left, so the dominant hand stays free for the things that need more dexterity.
There is a second reason to think about the kettle, and it has nothing to do with technique. Putting a hand on the kettle is a place to stop. Before you lift it, notice where you are holding tension. Notice your breath. Notice your feet on the floor. You do not pick it up until you have arrived.
The rest follows from that. Slow movements, graceful ones, as little disturbance of the leaves as possible. Economy of movement preserves heat and it preserves qi, and there is no version of this that works while you are hurrying.
The One Rule
Under all of it there is a single rule, and it is the only one worth memorizing.
The only real rule of gongfu is whether it brews better tea.
That rule cuts both directions. It gives you permission to abandon anything that is not helping, and it obliges you to keep the things that are, even the ones that look like fuss to someone watching.
How to Test Any of This
None of the above needs to be taken on trust. Two afternoons will settle most of it.
Two kettles, one tea. Heat the same water in two different kettles, or on two different heat sources, and brew the same tea from each. Same leaf weight, same temperature, same pot. Taste them beside each other.
One tea, two days. Brew the same tea two days running, holding everything constant except the vessel. Four grams, 200 degrees, same water, different pot. Take notes both days.
A thermometer helps here, and so does a second person. It is less subjective when someone else notices the same difference you did without being told what to look for.
Where This Goes
There is no ladder in any of this. A practice of forty years still begins with leaves in a bowl, and someone three weeks in can brew a tea beautifully by paying attention.
What changes is the number of things you can hear. The method, the vessel, the fire, the water, and the temperature are all one system, and each one you learn to notice makes the others easier to read.
So ask the tea first, then consider the people you are serving. Some days the answer is gongfu, sometimes a side handle, sometimes a long boil in a big pot for everyone in the room. The answer changes, and knowing when to move between them is the practice.