Umi Tea Sets

It’s been a little while since I last wrote a teaware review on Steepster – I think I often forget that’s something you can even do!! Also, is it weird to anyone else that “teapot” isn’t one of the teaware type catagories!?

Anyway – a company on instagram, Umi Tea Sets, recently was kind enough to let me select one of their yixing pots (a type of teaware they specialize in) to try out and review. It’s always nice adding a new yixing pot to the teaware rotation, so how could I resist!? This is the pot that I ended up selecting:

https://www.umiteasets.com/silent-zhi-yuan-fragrance-clay-teapot.html

I find that I’m often drawn to pots with short spouts and either a flatter or rounded shape, and this sort of has both! I’m also a fan of this greener looking purple clay (yes, I realize that statement appears to contradict itself), and as most of you know I own very little “plain” teaware so the characters on it also appealed to me. I do wish I knew what they said, though. In person, the pot looks identical to the site photographs.

Before I get into the teapot review itself – I also want to point out that this was one of, if not the best, packaged pieces of teaware that I’ve ever received! It was impressive, and took a significant amount of time to cut through the many layers of wrapping that were securing the pot.

I decided to season this pot with heicha – golden flower fu bricks in particular for now, but I’m open to expanding that to heicha in a more broad sense. I wanted to take the size into account since, ringing in at 180ml, this is a bigger pot than what I’m typically brewing in on a daily basis – not the biggest one in my collection, though. I don’t yet have a heicha dedicated pot but since heicha isn’t something I drink daily I think it’s the perfect choice because when I do brew up some heicha I want to have a longer session with more tea.

The pot feels balanced in my hand as I pour, which is an important quality for me. I have very small hands, and sometimes find full pots quite awkward to pour since my handle/lid grip can be a bit strained. I noticed some dripping during today’s session, this was slight and likely exaggerated by my often poor pouring technique I’ve developed from balancing a one handed pour with capturing photos on my cell phone for instagram.

So far, I’m very happy with this pot and I look forward to seeing what developments it has with long term usage. For the price point it retails at, I think the value is quite fair.

If you want to check out the other yixing pots that Umi Tea Sets is currently carrying here’s the link:

https://www.umiteasets.com/teapots/yixing-teapots.html

And here are some photos of the pot I took during today’s tea session:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CCRr5gxAcyN/

Sample today from Umi Tea Sets, its really damn good too :)
It’s best serve it up in your aroma cup if you have one so that you can enjoy the fragrance, it is quite nice, a very sweet floral aroma idk what but sweet like honeysuckle, I like it.
The taste is also slightly sweet like cane sugar almost and quite floral like drinking a flower also vegetal, mineral, no bitter or astringent at all its actually quite “juicy” with slight fruit notes as well like Peach perhaps.
Very good tea, I am pleased to have it.