Serving tea
Introduction
In my last post, I ended up defining tea as:
Tea is a beverage made by steeping (a perceptible level of) the leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant (possibly mixed with other ingredients, often other plants) in water.
Despite a fairly thorough process to arrive as this definition, I think this definition still doesn't fully capture the significance of tea. Particularly with food and drink, significance can come from how we consume. To demonstrate this, let's describe three ways to serve tea, from practical to ceremonial.
Cup
Though not common among Americans, you can just throw the leaves unbagged into a cup and pour water over the leaves. You don't need any special equipment, except to boil the water if you want it hot.
Unfortunately, the leaves present an annoyance when drinking, so we often end up bagging the tea. Even people who eschew pre-packaged teabags (for their purported lower quality) will bag their own loose leaf tea, to make drinking more pleasant. An evolution of this, reusable tea balls give you the convenience without the waste.
Teapot
Teapots come in an immense variety: eletric, whistling, ceramic, glass, clay, ornate, plain. For now, consider the standard ceramic teapot.
User experience researchers often use teapots as examples of surprisingly functional simplicity. The handle allows easy grip and adjusting the volume of the pour. The cover affords adding the leaves and cleaning the pot. And the spout filters out the leaves (except maybe small bits) while regulating the volume of the pour.
Compared to just cups (and teabags), the teapot seems to find its best fit in groups. One pot for every few people, and on top of saving effort you can provide the gesture of pouring tea for someone else.
Gaiwan
You've probably not heard of a gaiwan before. Literally “covered bowl,” a gaiwan differs from your average teapot in that it holds less water at a time.
As a result, you would expect to brew more batches with a gaiwan than with a teapot. This encourages studying how the character of the tea changes with subsequent brews, as well as spending more time drinking tea.
Conclusion
While I've ordered these three methods of serving tea from generally more practical to more ceremonial, you don't necessarily trade off practicality for ceremony. For example, while traditionally you grasp a gaiwan with your thumb and third finger on the rim and your second finger on the cover, I grasp a gaiwan with my third, fourth, and fifth fingers on the bottom of the plate and my thumb on the cover. This helps avoid burning the fingertips, as the bowl itself gets quite hot. I would claim it increases the practicality without sacrificing any ceremony.
In general, though, I want you to see the variety of ways we serve tea imbues tea with a variety of meaning. Just describing the makeup or construction does not fully capture the significance; consumption matters too.