Do the flowers ever break apart in the water? The picture shows it without the infuser or any sort of strainer, so are they suppose to hold completely together for three soaks?
You can buy replacement flowering teas at your local grocery store, our local Fred Meyer’s (Oregon) carries them, but they are also readily available online.
fyi, flowering teas have a milder taste than bagged teas.
I shot some pictures of flowering tea for my photography final last quarter. The leaves are hand-sewn together with cotton thread, and when they are steeped, they blossom beautifully. I was told that it dates back centuries, when royalty would present a tea ball in a cup to guests as a means of impressing said guests.
I can say with absolute certainty that replacement flowering tea balls can be purchased from Regan at Through the Looking Glass tea shop:
This is a really good deal. The only thing is that the pot should be completely open for everyone at the tale to be able to view the flower at the bottom of the teapot.
[QUOTE=wootasourous, post:11, topic:278515]
Can someone explain the difference between flowering tea and the regular ole tea bags? Not a tea aficionado.
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Sure, that’s an easy one. A flowering tea is a collection of dried tea leaves and/or flowers bound together (with generally with some kind of small thread) such that when you steep it, causing the dried leaves/blossoms to expand it looks pretty. That’s why half of the pot is transparent, because if you put a flowering tea in an opaque pot, you’re missing the show.
In terms of taste? They’re not really going to taste noticeably better than similar grade tea that’s not bound together in an ornamental fashion. That being said though, these things tend to be made of higher grade teas than you find in tea bags. Loose tea has four basic grades according to size: dust, fannings, broken orange pekoe (BOP), and orange pekoe (OP). You tend to get a better cup of tea, for whatever reason, the more intact the actual tea leaf is. So OP teas tend to be the best, while most tea bags contain only fannings and dust.
So this is going to taste better than whatever you get in bags at the megamart, but if you can find a specialty retailer that sells loose teas, those are probably just as good and will taste pretty much the same if you steep the same stuff, and cheaper per cup to boot (but you don’t get the show.)
In my experience as a tea aficionado, flowering teas are something to bring out for guests and people you want to impress, but not for everyday use.
Flowering teas are basically a flower bound together with other tea leaves into a ball. Then when you brew the ball of leaves/flower it will unfold and thus you get a flowering tea. Regular teas come in small to large leaf form and require something to sift the leaves out to drink the tea, thus you have the mesh filter that comes with the pot for regular tea leaves.
[QUOTE=wootasourous, post:11, topic:278515]
Can someone explain the difference between flowering tea and the regular ole tea bags? Not a tea aficionado.
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Having drunk flowering teas in China, I found flowering teas to be be a much softer flavor, especially for the non-tea drinker (I don’t like tea, but of course you have to drink it over there). I can tell you that Jasmine Flower was the most amazing tea flavor of all of them, and I’ve yet to find a reasonable fascimile in leaves here in the states. Tasted like an extremely sweet yet watery orange.
Yes the tea pot is meant for loose leaf tea thats what the infuser is for(the mesh thingy) but you can throw in a flowering tea bulb and it will expand as the tea infuses with the hot water. The tea is just like any other tea but way better because its loose leaf and not dust that comes in tea bags.
[QUOTE=jn082105, post:4, topic:278515]
Where can you buy more flowers if you run out?
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You can also use tea bags or loose tea. It comes with an infuser (for loose tea, if you’ve never used one before.)
[QUOTE=SeanL9941, post:21, topic:278515]
or do i need to use another teapot to boil the water.. then transfer it to this thing?
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Boil water separately, in a tea kettle or regular pot. It also couldn’t hurt to warm this pot (with warm or hot tap water) before adding boiling water. It keeps the tea warmer longer.
heck, for all we know, it might not even be tea! perhaps it’s part of the top-secret feline global domination plan, and those tea flowers are actually hairballs.