When it arrived I was horrified that I had paid $100, (this included four matching cups and shipping!) for this teeny, tiny pot, albeit with awesome fish on top who have eyes that rattle about which is a bonus. But still! So small!
And nothing tasted good in it to boot. I had my first half-dozen teas in hand by then, basics like Oriental Beauty, Tie Guan Yin, Dong Ding, a few puerhs, and so forth and the pot made everything taste gross. ( Please note the links to the tea companies with the above teas mentioned are exactly the ones I first started with, so go check them out!) I quickly bought a small gaiwan to explore these teas in their full flavor while awaiting decent Yixing pots. I followed my new online tea-friends advice in regard to cleaning and prepping the pot and by the time I was done, I had come to realize the pot was a novelty, a pretty thing of no real worth in helping me learn to experience Gongfu cha and I realized that not only was this pot not tiny, it was of ridiculous proportions, it was huge at 480ml!
Within a few weeks I became the owner of a couple of truly worthy pots to explore tea in, a basic 140ml Zi Sha from Teavivre.com which has since been dedicated to puerhs and is just what it should be, a (still) rather too-large vessel I rarely use but a utilitarian and honest creature nonetheless with a terrific pour and a wondrous little dragon egg that holds 110ml. I knew at that point the 'big' fish pot was just one of those newbie errors. I was advised to use it for decorative purposes so that's what this pot has been doing. Sitting and (quietly sulking perhaps, if it has a soul, I do not sense one in this pot as I do with my Jian Shui pots for instance!) collecting dust.
Just now, for no other reason than I was dusting and picked it up and I grabbed literally a handful, well, maybe a child's fistful of loose 1980's puerh and just tossed it into the enormous cauldron that is my googly-eyed fish pot and filled it up and made this enormous mug of intensely black puerh, which my husband literally gagged at when sipping, and I am delighting in. Is the tea good? Is it really as old as it proposes itself to be? I have no idea and fantasize that James from teaDB would walk in, taste it and tell me if I am a fool or right on the mark, but alas, that ain't gonna happen. Did I just pair a tea with a previously disregarded useless pot or am I ruining some rather pricey puerh by throwing it in helter-skelter into a Yixing pot that sucketh flavor and imparts weird chemical notes to all my attempted brews in the past?
It's more tea than I can safely drink without my stomach exploding and half of it has gone cold in my large Hagi cup as I write this, but the pot sits, wonderful smelling puerh leaves clinging to its inner belly for me to fill again at my leisure, and I think I just might.
Perhaps I have made a match. But perhaps I should not put this high-end one-of-a-kind( again, I might be fooling myself about the authenticity and value of this) puerh into this pot but should try this pot with other really full-bodied puerhs that I have not been so fond of? I have more than a few of shous that I loathed when first getting into Chinese tea, which is when this pot arrived and maybe now that my palate knows teas don't have to be sweet and easy to be worthy of my time and consideration and can have bitter notes and still be good experiences in sipping, perhaps it is now I should give those teas I stuffed into the very back of my puerh drawer another go, using this huge googly-eyed fishy pot.
These puerhs I deemed horrid in those first few weeks of drinking anything other than Earl Gray, tisanes and sencha's, bancha's, genmaichas etc. are not crap teas from a crap vendor, they are from a good source we all know and trust, so I know it is not the tea, it is, or rather was, me, as usual!
(Oh dear, I just brewed it up again and it almost fills my enormous 'dog lover' mug. What the hell am I doing? This is good puerh (I think) and I put it not even into a Japanese Hagi mug this time, which would be bad enough but into this coffee mug? Even if it does say, 'Made in China' on the bottom, this is an outrage even to my newbie senses! If I live after drinking all this, please do not think me a goddess, no, but if I die, than thou mayest say I gave my life in pursuit of puerh, and not in a Gongfu cha fashion nor in dainty-lady style, but in a typically outrageous choice of over-indulgence, senselessness and impulsiveness, for there I will find my truth in the after-life. Barring that, I am going to be in the bathroom for a long-ass time tonight and of this there can be no doubt.
