Food and Drinks

Finding a teapot can be as simple, and as hard, as simply looking on line. Simple because a simple search with your favorite search engine will bring up hundreds, if not thousands, of websites through which to search for the teapot of your choice. Hard because there are just so many different choices to make.

Beyond all those pages of teapots, you have more pages of the extras that go to help you with your tea brewing. Lots of strainers and infusers, timers and thermometers, and different bases and removable handles. So many choices to make but so many ways to make your tea sipping more enjoyable.

But even with just the teapots themselves, you will find an almost endless variety of ways to choose a pot. You can start with the what the pots are made from such as glass or metal. There are clay teapots made from whatever clay is local to the pot maker such as the Yxīng teapots of China. You also have beautiful glazed and painted porcelain pots. The material you choose may depend on the tea you drink.

When looking for a tea pot, perhaps the first thing you will notice is all the different shapes they come in. You can find short and tall pots. You can find strange ones made to look like some animal or plant or even a car or plane. If it can be formed to hold water and tea leaves, you will probably find the shape somewhere that you desire.

They come in every color under the sun. There are the various shades of purple of Yixing clay pots from China. There are the red and white Staffordshire tea pots. Of course there is the silver color of silver and stainless steel pots. There are the traditional blue and white pots of Europe.

Finding a teapot from a specific location can probably be done if that is what you want. Being a person who wants a teapot, at least enough to look on line, probably means you want something you can’t find locally. It might be a Tetsubin from Japan or a special Staffordshire from Great Britain. It could be the most fragile porcelain from China. Whatever it is, there are teapots from all around the world.

Not only has geography left its mark upon the humble, or not-so-humble, teapot. Each era throughout time has left its trace as well. Indeed some believe that the first teapots in Europe were not from China but instead were influenced by the Moorish coffee pots. There were the oval shaped ones of the late 1700s and the drum shapes just before the Napoleonic Wars. Even modernism of the last century impacted the shape of teapots. Whatever your taste, there is a teapot for you.

Lastly, not only will your aesthetic senses decide the teapot for you, but the tea you like to drink will as well. There are so many different factors in choosing a teapot. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of saying, “I like that one.”