Playing with the leaves after a session with our WMD Mansa raw puer. With tea this powerful, I needed something to occupy myself.

After a quick trip to Jianshui we came back with a lot of new teaware, including this little 85ml pot.

After receiving some new teaware to add to the store, we decided to collect some of our glass gong dao beis and take a picture. It was raining outside, and there wasn’t much else to do.

The ingredients for our own tea sangria recipe, in honour of Coomi’s birthday! For this we used:

• Fruit: Pineapple, strawberry, apple, peach – but many other things would work well too. We avoided anything that falls apart easily or gets messy.
• Booze: Red wine, Absolut Wild Tea infused vodka. We couldn’t track down any tea vodka, so we substituted with Finlandia lime instea.
• Juice: Anything you want! We used mangosteen juice.
• And of course tea: For this one we used a dancong oolong that is quite similar to our Firebird Song Zhong (a great way to make use of a leftover sample!), but we have also used Dian Hong in the past, including our Sabertooth ancient tree.

We threw in a liberal amount of fruit, added most of the bottle of wine and added approximately 350ml of tea to the sangria. Approximately 12g of the oolong was cold brewed in a 2.5L pitcher at room temperature for 2+ hours. This will allow you to cold brew the same tea 2 or 3 more times after that though, so you may want to use a little less leaf. As we tend to do with cooking in general, nothing was really measured (except vodka), just added to taste. Leave to chill for a few hours or over night if possible.

A new gong dao bei and new zitao twisted bracelet. For those who have seen the twisted clay cups, this is the same concept, but in bracelet form. Zitao is not just for brewing tea, but also makes great jewelry, tea storage, accessories, and chicken steamers (a Yunnan specialty)

The newest addition to our own collection of cups. This ceramic cup is glazed with silver and then has a hand painted fish on it. This is not a pure silver cup, but still imparts much of the same properties to the tea when using it for drinking. We are still on the fence as to whether or not we will stock anything like this… beautiful pieces of this sort comes with a price.

More teaware that we hope to make available soon. It’s not every day that you see a hexagonal gong dao bei.