Materials
Teapots come in all shapes and sizes, but also they are made from all kinds of materials. The table below outlines the pros and cons for the most common materials.
I eventually decided to make my tea pot from ceramics. Adhering to my design evaluation criteria, ceramics struck me as the material that would be able to tick all the boxes that I envisioned for me teapot. Ceramics has the best heat-retention capacities, is taste neutral when glazed, and I find it visually as well as haptically appealing.
Below, I quickly outline the properties of other materials that disqualified them as the material for my perfect teapot.
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Below, I quickly outline the properties of other materials that disqualified them as the material for my perfect teapot.
- Glass: First, I generally dislike the look and feel of glass tea ware. They had glass teapots in my grandfathers retiring home and the hospital that I was stationed in after a bad knee injury. Second, whilst it is nice to see the colour change when brewing tea, glass teapots tend to fog up, which I find unaesthetic. Third, glass has poorer heat retention capacities than ceramics.
- Iron: Iron teapots tend to have not-so-great heat retention capacities. You would have to make cast iron teapots quite thick, which would make it very heavy and harder to handle. Finally, in order for iron pots to be taste-neutral, they have to be enamel coated. Sometimes these coatings start to fall off after some time and the teapot becomes useless.
- Aluminium: Are often used for economic reasons. They can easily be mass-produced due to cheap resource prices and easy manufacturing (aluminum can easily be bent into form). I disqualified aluminum because of the negative connotation of being "cheap". However, it is also suboptimal in terms of taste-neutrality and heat-retention.
- Clay: Clay teapots, i.e. unglazed ceramics teapots cannot be used for various kinds of tea, as the clay tends to be slightly porous and absorbs tastes over time.
- Porcelain: I was confused at first, because the terms ceramics and porcelain are used somewhat tantamount in my native tongue German. See my subsection on ceramics for more details
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