Teaware

Ut oh, an update to my earlier raving:

The plastic inside parts of the tops absorb scents/flavors and so far I’m having a hard time getting the last out. I’d hope/assumed they were made of plastic that was as limited as possible in this, but it was actually quite easy. I have made two fruited/scented teas in it and each time I had to scrub and soak the lids to get the neutrality back.

The first one wasn’t an intensely flavored tea so a day of scrub and soak practice got it back to normal.

This second one is the admittedly one with a very strong cinnamon component. They’ve been soaked and scrubbed a few times today and are currently soaking again.

100% neutrality isn’t necessary in such things, but these were both strong enough that I’d be smelling them while sipping something else out of the bottle so I need/ed to get them out or at least gone to just a trace.

Will update on success.

Otherwise, though, still an awesome product that I highly recommend. Just be more careful than I in using flavored and scented teas in it.

I’ve had other smaller versions of this type of cup was curious but wary due to the negative points of the ones I owned. After handling and speaking with the vendor at the Coffee & Tea Festival NYC I went ahead and got the 14oz.

It is sturdy, holds heat really well, doesn’t leak, and the brew space between the two lids is quite good for a travel container. I’ve used it a good number of times already this week and am very, very pleased. It is awesome.

I like this tea thing. It is well-made and it is pretty. It drains the tea and the lid never falls off the tea thing.

I have a 400 ml pot so that is the size I am reviewing. I love my pot. The glass is sturdy , pours well anbd the big infuser basket naerly fills the pot so there is lots of room even for big leafy teas.
The lid, if one pours slowly, stays in place.
The only con I can think of is. the there isnt an easy way to remove the basket when your tea is ready. It gets hot to the touch and does. not have a handle. Tweezers or tea tongs make that a non-issue.
Reasonably priced, well made.
My only real complaint is that I should have bought a smaller size. The smallest size is 300 ml.

This works fine. You can pop out the bottom strainer to clean it if needed and get any stuck leaves loose, which was touted to me as a selling point. I think the filter in my Ingenuitea popped out as well, but I never knew that until it fell off of the counter and the handle shattered off! The filter popped out at that time as well, but went right back in. Wasn’t a problem for me that it didn’t come out, I don’t really worry much about tea stains and leaves never got stuck along the sides or under the filter. The Timolino does get leaves caught at the sides of the strainer from time to time, which doesn’t please me terribly but I can live with it. :) You can also put this whole thing in the microwave, unlike the metal mesh strainer in the Ingenuitea, but I use a kettle for my water, not the microwave, so again, not a big selling point for me over any other gravity infuser. I do think I prefer the metal mesh from the Ingenuitea – it just seemed sturdier. :)

So, I went to a local tea place where I bought my Ingenuitea hoping to replace it. All she had were these Timolinos. I figured it would cost about the same as the Ingenuitea and holy cow was I wrong. I should have just walked away – I could have replaced from Adagio online and cost less even with shipping. This is also about half the price on Amazon that I paid for it locally. But I hate to have someone ring something up and then change my mind, so I paid for taking the path of least resistance and not looking at the tag before putting it on the counter. Ah, well. Supporting the local economy counts for something. And I didn’t have to go back to filter basket in the cup for my tea until a replacement arrived. So hooray for local instant gratification. :)

UPDATE: Lowering rating because this leaks if you leave liquid in it for more than a couple of hours. I normally don’t, but I had just a little bit that wouldn’t fit in the cup a couple of times in the past weeks and each time, when I went back to pick it up, empty it, etc., it had leaked all over the counter. If you are just worried about drips, the coaster with the little lip on it that comes with the Timolino takes care of them but don’t let more than a couple of tablespoons sit in this for long or things will get… wet. I now have some paperwork that looks like authentically aged parchment…

I received this teapot for Christmas and have used it many times since. Though I was apprehensive about using this teapot (due to the negative review on Teapigs website) I can happily say I’ve not had any problems with this. I can steep a litre (35oz) of tea for a good long session, or steep enough to fill my flask for iced tea.

The steeping egg can fit up to roughly 15g of black or blended tea (without much room to expand) and for my taste it’s a nice strength. A little on the light side for some teas so not suitable for everything but for your generic blends and the odd Oolong or unflavoured black it’s great. Plus once it’s steeped for however long needed I can just pull the egg steeper up and remove it from the water, making sure I don’t oversteep. Oversteeping is a problem with my Adagio PersonaliTEA pot so at least now I have something more suitable.

I would recommend this teapot, especially for flavoured tea blends, it’s a welcomed edition to my tea family.

I bought the steep & go before Christmas and am finally trying it out. But for the life of me I can’t get it screwed on. I bought a bottle of Dasani (16.9 oz) to try this out and every way I’ve tried I can’t get it threaded. Is there some magic trick to it?

This broad work well when picking Pu’ Er tea cake.

Well, the lid is definitely picking up smells from flavored teas. My plan is to deodorize it and continue to use it only for unflavored teas. I will buy an infuser made of a non-porous material (still looking to find the right one) for when I brew flavored teas in the future. I still love this teapot, though!

I’m pretty sure I messed up adding this. Most other teaware items have a different format, but I couldn’t find a place where anyone explained how to do this…

Anyhow, this is the best teapot I’ve owned. It’s the perfect size for two people to have two cups of tea each or four people to have one cup each. I love glass teapots in general. I think they’re beautiful and I enjoy seeing the color of the tea. But what really makes this teapot stand out is that there is so much space in the infuser for the leaf to expand. The infuser compared to the overall volume of the teapot is huge, and it’s also very easy to clean. The teapot itself is also easy to clean because it doesn’t have a traditional spout. The only thing I worry about are the rubbery components absorbing smells from flavored tea, but so far so good. Also, it comes it many colors, but I opted for a more neutral black.

I bought this cup for work and love it so much that I had to buy another one for at home!

I have this mug…if you’re a doctor who fan…it’s awesome!!! Now I know it’s just a picture but any whovian would say otherwise. It’s my daily tea mug…just awesome. Only a couple downfalls, after you hand wash it (not dishwasher safe…oh well) don’t leave it wet, the plastic costing that show the disappearing tardis will bubble and eventually come off. But aside from that, it’s just so cool…now to get my doctor who TARDIS teapot:)

I don’t own this teapot myself, but the folks over at thesweethome.com gave it very high marks in a review of their preferred tea steepers: http://thesweethome.com/reviews/best-tea-steeper/

Here’s the amazon link:http://www.amazon.com/Hario-Chacha-Glass-Teapot-23oz-700ml/dp/B0007WTBQ0/

I’ve been meaning to review this as I know some Steepsters are waiting on bated breath to hear what I think—such pressure, har—but I’ve dragged my feet some because it’s a little complicated (at least to me). Let’s see if I can break this down coherently.

Pros:
Decent capacity (~12oz), probably just right for 2 servings of the kinds of teas it seems most meant for, ie, resteep champs (think East Asian greens and oolongs). May seem a little small if you’re used to running around with 16oz of piping hot Western-y legacy-style or flavored blacks. What I like about this size is it’s sort of a concession between those two poles—it makes sense the more well-known glass version was relatively small (8oz or less IIRC) given it seems intended for those Chinese and Japanese-style teas, but this gives you a litle more room in case you want more options.

The mesh in the filter is rather fine. I don’t know yet if it’s rooibos-fine (I pretty much never go out with anything lacking caffeine, ha), but it’s teaball-fine for sure at least.

Easy to clean. The sleak uniform design of it means there’s no fragile or fiddly bits for gunk to get stuck in. The drinking chamber is narrow as with most tumblers so you wouldn’t be able to fit your hand down to the bottom to handwash, but a bottle brush is an obvious solution, and (I’m skeptical and haven’t done this myself but) Dragon Tea House claimed it’s dishwasher safe when I asked them about it.

Cons:
It doesn’t seem like it retains heat especially well. This is sort of a plus given that, again, it seems geared towards people who drink more delicate teas like greens and oolongs. And it’s not horrible at retaining heat, just not as good as Western thermoses designed expressly for that purpose. (I put this under cons but for me it isn’t one really; I actually have a problem with most tumblers keeping tea undrinkably hot for too long. YMMV depending on your on-the-go tea-drinking schedule!) Preheating the drinking chamber with hot water would help if this was an issue, of course.

The rim where you drink from is, while not like deadly sharp or anything, a bit unpleasant to drink from given it’s just cold steel and pretty finely edged. It is like drinking out of a tin cup while camping. I understand why it is—the “interchangeable screw top and bottom and removable infusing chamber” design relies on all of the pieces screwing together easily and not breaking down over time, and being leakproof, and in order to do that with soft parts all four components would have to be rimmed in gasket-tight material and would make for a much more complicated design. So it makes sense to me it’s as simple as it is. But if the lip of where you drink being comfy is a big issue, I don’t know what to tell you (IIRC the Copco I tried had similar issues with so-sharp-you-can-cut-yourself steel parts, seems almost inevitable when you decide to focus on a steel body).

As for leakproofness, this one’s tricky. It IS leakproof as long as you’re careful and good about screwing everything just right (making sure the threading is lined up right when you start). However, there’s this thing—and I have a feeling I might need more practice and then it won’t be a problem—where when you unscrew the infusing chamber, residual water the leaves are holding onto leaks onto you, the tumbler, etc. because there’s that moment when you’re unscrewing it and there’s nothing below the infuser basket to catch that water (and obviously you can’t turn it upside down so the top lid catches it, as then all your tea would fall out!). And I don’t mean like the drops when you lift an infuser basket from a mug normally, that you can put your hand under—I’m talking as soon as you start unscrewing the infusing chamber but it’s still connected to the drinking chamber, there’s that vacuum sucking sound and water immediately starts dribbling down the sides of the tumbler. Still figuring that out (maybe if I “burp” it by unscrewing just slightly then pausing to let air in before continuing it’ll help).

Also:
I am sorry but I honestly can’t remember right now if it’s uncomfortable to touch while there’s hot water in it (this was an issue with the hourglass flip tumbler). I’m pretty sure it wasn’t an issue—maybe a little uncomfortably warm but nothing that burns or actually hurts—but if I’m remembering wrong I’ll edit this later.

The weight/heft is interesting. I am impressed because it seems like they made sure to strike a balance here, especially with how moving the infuser chamber from top to bottom affects the tumbler’s stability. It’s heavy enough to act a bit as a weight at the bottom while infusing and once you’re ready to drink your tea, but not so heavy that when on top when you have yet to infuse (say, you’ve packed it up with your leaves and water so when you get wherever you’re going you can infuse, or for whatever reason you’ve got the infuser on the top for a while) it’s unstable. I wouldn’t say the thermos is light or heavy overall; it’s in between. It feels a smidge thick in the hand (especially compared to stuff like the hourglass flip tumbler, with its slender “waist” in the center) but it’s slimmer and more comfortable overall than the Copco was, and it fits in standard car cup holders.

You don’t need my review to tell you this, it’s inherent to the design described on the website, but this is the kind of tumbler you need to unscrew a lid to drink from, where it becomes like an open-mouthed cup when unscrewed. There’s no sliding/tabbed sipping holes or anything like that. Some people require that, some people don’t like them (I don’t, as I don’t like slurping hot beverages up into my mouth; I’m the sort who always altogether removes disposable coffee cup lids as soon as I can). So, just noting which category in falls in.

All in all, it is the best tumbler I’ve tried for when you want to infuse on the go and don’t want to deal with disposing of the spent leaves and infuser basket afterward. But it’s not a perfect dream come true home run exactly. And it is more suited, at least I think, to the kind of tea drinker who has a more Eastern approach—likes unflavored greens and oolongs, say, and tends to like gongfu brewing or at least “resteep a lot” type straight teas.

All of that said, I am glad I own it! I don’t know if most Steepsters would think it worth the price tag though. Just a heads up.

Used mine tonight.

It does what it’s supposed to well, and is easy to clean. A must for serious matcha drinkers.

Got this in the family Christmas grab bag. It works pretty well! I’ve been sitting with a cup (thin bone china) of hot tea in a cold (67F) room for about 2 hours now and the tea is still hot. Not as hot as when originally brought downstairs of course, but hot enough to call it more than warm. :) Short of a cup cozy plus a lid, this is a good and inexpensive alternative.

Plus, it is sunny!

Hello all, it is time for another Tea Gear Review! excited cheering from the audience yes yes, I know these are exciting because we tea drinkers tend to ogle and hoard gear as much as we do tea. Possibly even much so since the tea gear is what brings us our delicious cups of liquid happiness. Today we are looking at the Shudei Kyusu from Den’s Tea, yes the one that I babble about periodically.

Backstory time! I first ran into the concept of the Kyusu (or Kyuusu) when I was in high school and going through that ‘obsessed with Japan and Anime’ phase (not that I have left that phase, it just has been nerfed a bit) and studying Chado and their tea culture. I was able to find a Tetsubin pretty easily but I never saw a Kyusu outside of books and online. Of course the prices online were intensely high and I am in the mindset of ‘when I buy a new piece of equipment, don’t spend too much money on it because chances are you will break it.’ I wanted a practice piece, and while browsing I found this beauty and its lovely price.

This Kyusu is made from Shudei, or red clay which has a higher level of iron oxide (and reminds me of the clay I would play with growing up in Georgia) which gives it a lovely color. There is a mostly convenient built in metal sieve for filtering out the leaves that try to escape. I say mostly convenient because being built in means it can be a real pain to clean.

I have used it quite a few times since I bought it back in late September and each time has been a treat. The size is optimal for two cups, but since I am the only one in the house that likes Japanese Green tea I usually only fill it up halfway. I like having the option of more servings should the opportunity arise. My favorite aspect of the kyusu is holding it, the handle is the perfect size for my grip and it just feels good pouring the tea.

I have noticed that it is not retaining any tea aromas or flavors (unlike Yixing) but judging by the sheen I am pretty sure this teapot has been given a glaze making it safe to use with multiple teas. Not that I am going to use it for anything other than my various Japanese greens. I am very happy with my Kyusu (it needs a name…I like naming my teapots, suggestions?) and I actually feel I do not need a fancy expensive one for my collection.

For blog and photos (and a few helpful links!) http://ramblingbutterflythoughts.blogspot.com/2013/11/dens-tea-shudei-kyusu-tea-gear-review.html

General Review:
This is a good tea “ball”. It is just a tad smaller than an open top steeper, so there is room for the tea to move around. The only complaint would be that it has larger holes on the top of the “ball”, so smaller teas/debris escapes easily. However, this is great for using in my favorite tea pot because if I stand it up like in the picture (it has three little pegs on the bottom so you can stand it up), I am able to fit it in my teapot perfectly. It fits so that the water stops at about the line near the top. It was like it was made for my teapot! (p.s. the teapot I am talking about is the James Sadler Teapots – Tower of London Heritage. This makes clean up way easier on me than just straining the tea.

So, overall: This has its flaws and is a tad overpriced for the product, but it worked in my situation perfectly. I would only use this for smaller/medium tea pots or single cups. I would also avoid small leaf teas with this product.

I Had to drop my rating down, after about 9 months my kettle up and died. The little readout still works but it won’t heat up my water anymore. Maybe I used it too much and it exceeded its lifespan…live fast and yard and die young.

I am so bummed about this, since this is pretty much the cheapest variable kettle on the market (with the ability to set and know the temperature) I am probably just going to get another one since it is all I can afford. And of course this happened when I have a million teas to review on my blog, thanks tea kettle…no really, you were awesome…but why did you have to die?

Lets be honest, I drink a lot of tea and I am also antisocial. What does that have to do with anything, well I live in a house with other people and there are long periods of time where I don’t want to have to go to the kitchen because it almost always means interacting. The kitchen was where my stove was and if I wanted tea I had to submit to being around people. This became even more of a problem when I became a full blown tea blogger since I needed access to the kitchen more.

Luckily I have an awesome mom who got this beauty for me as an early birthday gift so I can have tea in my room. Also she knew my lament at having to use the ‘Chinese water boiling technique’ instead of having temperature control, it was a perfect gift. This kettle does a wonderful job of heating water to the desired temperature, even my most finicky greens come out perfectly. There are no weird tastes from the kettle that taint the water. There is also a function to have it turn on at a specific time so you can wake up to water ready for tea, I have not used this function yet but the idea is pretty awesome.

I have only had it about a month so I cannot really speak to durability, but I do use it multiple times a day, switching between temperatures, and using it at various water levels and it is still going strong.

Complaints? It is loud! I find the roar of the water heating up comforting because it means tea, but it has woken my boyfriend up a few times during my nocturnal tea drinking times. Also the noise terrifies my cats though they are getting used to it! The cord is pretty short, easily fixed with an extension cord.

I seriously love Libre. My first bookkeeping job was with Libre Tea and having seen some of the inner workings only makes me love it more. The owner of the company is one of the reasons I’ve fallen so hard for tea. I’d go up to the office and she’d bring me some loose leaf peppermint tea in one of these beautiful little Libre glasses and it made learning the ins and outs of the job all the more enjoyable.

Now that the rest of my family is catching up with tea, all of them are getting more use out of their Libre glasses. As someone who doesn’t like to oversteep tea even a little bit, I haven’t tried putting the leaves in the bottom of the glass and drinking through the strainer. I prefer just to steep and remove. But this glass is perfect for that. Minimal leakage, very hardy(I’m a dropper, I can’t help myself) and I’ve had no problems with my tea not being warm. I will always recommend this glass and this company!

it’s so pretty, so pretty. I want to love it, I do love it, but it’s got flaws.
Pros: SO PRETTY, especially with a gorgeous loose tea floating in there, i get a lot of people asking about it, it’s really almost a tea fashion accessory.
Love the size, and the fact that the inner is glass.
UPDATE!
Mine was defective and the company sent a replacement which is working like a hot damn! This is with me at ALL times so I’m happy to have it without having a matching coloured tea stained shirt! Thank you Libre!
Canadian company is a huge pro, as is the holographic lid of gorgeousness. REALLY love the look of it.

Cons: Doesn’t keep tea hot for very long
expensive. I hummed and hawed over this for 2 years before buying it finally, I default to it only if I’m drinking something pretty. I’m shallow.