What Are Tea Pets? The right way to Use Clay Tea Pets From Historical China

The act of consuming tea is a lesson in mindfulness. Persistence is required whereas the water boils and because the tea steeps, unfurling and releasing its aroma. It’s the antithesis of consuming two pictures of espresso and speeding someplace.

Including a tea pet to this routine is a enjoyable and straightforward method to prolong the ritual of tea-making. For the uninitiated, tea pets are sometimes clay collectible figurines that stay on tea trays and date again hundreds of years to historic China. They have been crafted from the surplus of clay used to make teaware and have become fantastic, albeit silent, companions to drink tea with.

Though, sure, they’re very cute, tea pets do way more than sit fairly. “In Gongfu tea ceremonies, you must first rinse the tea to eliminate impurities and mud,” Leo Lukidi, proprietor of Las Vegas tea store, Tea and Whisk, explains. “The concept is that after you rinse the tea, as a substitute of simply dumping it right into a bowl, you feed it to your tea pet.” The primary rinse of tea isn’t just for washing the tea and cleansing it, nevertheless it additionally permits the tea leaves to bloom and ship a stronger taste. At Lukidi’s store in Vegas, tea pets adorn the cabinets and stay scattered atop a tea desk within the middle within the showroom, the place company who go to for tastings sit. There, they’ll feed the pets that decision the tea store house and undertake their very own.

Tea pets could change coloration over time or take up the scent of teas as they proceed to be fed. “Each time you pour scorching tea over it, that’s when it comes alive essentially the most, which is pleasant,” Amy Truong, co-owner of San Diego–primarily based Paru Tea, says.

It’s the explanation why she, too, determined to hold tea pets in her store: to unfold a little bit pleasure and likewise add routine to the tea ceremony and a way of measuring how a lot tea one consumes in a lifetime. “It’s form of enjoyable to assume that the tea pet has drank the identical quantity of tea you’ve been consuming years in the past. It is also thought-about an heirloom that you would be able to cross down via generations, which I discover actually highly effective.”