Go on, do it - picture a teapot inside your mind.
It's a simple object isn't it? Very easy to imagine.
So imagine how many bad teapots are out there. You maybe haven't given it much thought until now but teapots (especially here in France where tea-drinking is something fancy and decidedly bourgeoisie) come in many shapes and sizes meaning there is sooooo much that can go wrong in teapot design.
Sadly for the committed tea-drinker fashion, faddishness and bad design are allowed to trump basic, simple and centuries-old good teapot design.
First, let us list the worst kind of teapots, all of which are impractical for one reason or another. They are also very poor at the one thing they are supposed to do, namely providing a vessel in which tea can stew and be easily poured:
1. The Cast Iron Teapot
This offender would be ideal for making tea - if you could only make your tea over an open fire.
The long handle stops the fire from heating it up too much and the shallow bowl of the pot allows for maximum surface area for the fire to heat the water.
On the other hand if you use one of those new-fangled electric kettle thingies to boil your water this design is stupid. The shallow bowls makes the water go cold far too quickly and this prevents the tea from stewing properly. The long handle serves no purpose whatsoever other than to make pouring the tea extremely difficult. And cast iron loses heat remarkably quickly. If you use one of these your tea will never stew properly and you will probably end up pouring it down your maiden aunt's lap.
If you own one of these teapots and bought it yourself you deserve these mishappenings and more.
I would heartily recommend this kind of teapot to anyone who is a Chinese peasant. These teapots are widely available in France. Evidemment.
2. The Metal Teapot
This little fella is well-known to all of us. It's the staple go-to-choice of cheap cafes and motorway service stations alike. It's designed to be durable and dishwasher friendly to make it easy to clean in very busy kitchens.
It's the perfect choice for a greasy spoon or somewhere similar.
The cons are that it will burn you. This teapot has the mindset of a psychopathic arsonist. Even the slightest of brushes against this workman-like trooper will be enough to redden your skin and make you yelp. If the designer wasn't clever enough to include a second metal strip on the handle (and whoever designed the one pictured above, like all too many before, falls into this thickest of categories) then the teapot will also scold you when you pour the tea.
Further burning to the finger tips will occur if you want to lift the lid to check how the mashing is progressing or give it a stir to encourage it.
This teapot is only truly safe to use once your tea has turned cold.
Finally, they need to be big - a small teapot will have a greater surface area to volume ratio and will lose heat too rapidly.
Fortunately, the French don't stock these teapots. As tea-drinking is so middle class here there isn't a market for these kind of cheap teapots.
But let's face it - they're perfectly acceptable alongside a fry-up down the local cafe where a good degree of risk to your health is an acceptable price to pay for a full English.
3. The Ornate Teapot
Oooooohhhh. Isn't she fancy! Look at that!
It's the kind of teapot your Granny used to keep in the cabinet and would only ever get used once a decade. Great for display but perfectly impractical in every way possible.
And take a look at the daft, ornate shape of the bowl. Why's it like that? Answer - to make it look fancy. You might think there's nothing wrong with this. After all, aesthetic beauty is an essential for a happy existence but that design comes with a drawback; the best teapots have a spherical bowl for a sound, scientific reason: It retains heat better and provides the maximum volume.
Owing to its uneven design and many intricacies his teapot will pour erratically - with dangerous consequences. You have been warned.
Keep this teapot where it belongs - in the display cabinet under lock and key.
4. The Aluminium Teapot
This suffers from similar problems to the cast iron teapot.
Although the shape of the bowl is much better, the material is even thinner and will lose heat at an even faster rate than the thick cast iron version.
There is a further problem with this kind of teapot - just at what point do you add the tea? Adding the tea as the water is boiling will spoil the flavour. Allowing the tea to boil will essentially cook the tea instead of allowing it to infuse and will ruin the delicate flavours and aromas.
There's also that silly handle again. I suppose you could boil water in this teapot first and then take it off the heat, add the tea and then put a nice thick tea cosy over it. But that provides two extra problems - you need a mat thick enough to put the teapot on to stop it burning your kitchen work surface AND you need a ridiculously large tea cosy to keep it warm whilst accommodating that silly handle.
Perhaps if you're lucky enough to own an aga, you could keep it atop of that to keep the tea warm but if your aga's too hot you re-encounter the problem of cooking the tea and ... well ... you need to have an aga stove right next to where you want to take your cuppa.
This is a teapot doesn't know what it ought to being doing. It is a teapot that desperately wants to be a kettle. It's like watching Fabien Barthez or Rene Higuita fannying about with the ball outside the box all over again. It can only end badly.
It's entirely impractical. Give it to the rag and bone man.
5. The Glass Teapot
I confess that this is the best of the teapots featured so far.
It also has a benefit that opaque teapots lack - you can watch your brew mashing! Hurrah! No need for tricky conversation or boredom with this teapot! Watch your waters turn murky brown! Endless fascination and fun for all the family!
As exciting as I'm sure this is, a well made pot of tea doesn't need to be watched. In fact, rather like the boiling of the kettle, I suspect that a watched teapot never stews. Besides, only a novice or exceedingly sloppy tea-maker could ever make a pot that failed to brew. You'd need King John levels of incompetence to fail this task. To be frank, if you need a see-through teapot to ensure your tea is ready then you haven't graduated from tea-making nursery school. I suggest for you a nice glass of milk instead. Just don't fill it too close to the top.
And what about the cleaning, eh? Fancy getting your hands inside a teapot to scrub that last bit of tea from inside the spout? No. Neither do I. That's why glass teapots are out.
People with glass teapots should throw stones, or something. It's lacks warmth and charm. It's all too modern. Yuk.
6. The Infusion Teapot
These little pretentious gits have all the lah-de-dah-ness of the glass teapot but come with the crappiness of having an infusion sieve inside them.
Worse than glass teapots, these imposters are often made of plastic which is a cardinal sin against tea. Plastic affects the flavour of the tea AND stains irreparably.
And if you're going to go to the -admirable- effort of using loose tea leaves then you may as well do it properly and use a tea strainer over the top of cup. An infuser inside the pot is a half-way house we could all do without.
You can also get ceramic infusion teapots with ceramic infusers - this is another crime against tea. Ceramic is a brittle material not adept to having holes punched into meaning that a ceramic infuser can never allow enough water to pass through it to stew the tea effectively. It also insulates the tea trapped inside meaning the heat in the pot convects in two separate cavities. You end up with the soppy water outside the infuser and the tea trapped inside it. This does NOT make for a satisfactory cuppa.
However, most of these pots are made of something see-through which tells you all you need to know. Like the glass teapot they are for showing off and should be sunned by the rightful Tea Drinking Community.
As if proof were needed, take a look at the example above - they're advertising it with some garish bright red muck. It's not even real tea. It's for ponces and posers. As is the teapot. Avoid.
7. The Infusion-Plunger Teapot
Exactly like the infusion teapot but a bit pricier because it has a plunger.
I've no problem with them costing a little bit more. Because let's face it - if you haven't worked out that a teapot with an infuser does NOT need a plunger then you deserve to waste your money and suffer garish bright red "tea" made from gojobobo berries or essence of bonobo balls or whatever crud goes into them.
Plungers are for coffee pots, blocked drains, toilets and Daleks.
Tellingly, these are VERY popular in France.
8. The Novelty Teapot
No.
No no no.
Just, NO.
These belong behind lock and key in the display cabinet. If collecting teapots is your thing then that's fine. But don't ever use it for brewing.
Just as you should strangle anyone wearing a "whacky" neck tie, if anyone should ever attempt to serve you tea stewed in a novelty teapot it is your duty to smash the teapot to ensure the mistake cannot be repeated.
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So there we have it.
Those are the main mistakes that teapot designers make, so let's take a look at what a GOOD teapot should look like.
Here it is:
The Brown Betty Teapot
It is a masterclass of design. The perfect marriage of form and function. Let us take a few moments to appreciate its underplayed brilliance, admire its beauty and list why this centuries-old design is ideal for making the perfect cuppa and endures to this day.
1. The shape of the bowl
The round bowl maximizes the volume of tea and at the same time minimizes heat lost. It also aids the mashing of tea by encouraging convection of heat inside the pot. AND easily accommodates a tea cosy. Voila!
2. The Material
A good Brown Betty can be made of china clay or ceramic. These insulate the tea brilliantly and mean you do not scold yourself when you pour the tea. Either of these materials is good but I prefer the ceramic glaze both aesthetically and because it proves more durable.
3. The spout
Simple in design but crucially tapered at the end to minimise the dreadful fatal curse of many a teapot: dripping. It is also positioned at least level with the height of the rim of the teapot to ensure you can actually fill the pot without the water spilling out of the spout. It is a good distance from the main body of the bowl to help prevent spilling when carrying the pot. It never ceases to amaze me how many teapots fail this most basic of functions.
4. The lid
The lid has a small hole to allow steam to escape and a lip underneath to prevent it from falling off whilst pouring. This is essential to a civilized teapot.
5. The handle
Take a good look at the handle. It is a masterpiece. Note how it is not perfectly rounded but instead has a slight angle on the outer face. This is another ESSENTIAL piece of teapot design.
It makes the whole teapot ergonomic. Essentially that means that the handle fits perfectly to your hand when you pour it. This *slightest* of angles in the handle allows you to place your thumb over the top of the handle and use your middle finger as a fulcrum, turning the handle into a lever for the teapot. It lessens the effort and massively reduces the grip required to pour tea. A bad teapot with perfectly rounded handle does not do this.
A full teapot can be quite heavy (especially if you are elderly or suffer arthritis) but this tiny wee adaptation takes the effort out of pouring. A well designed handle like this is perfectly capable of being poured or held steady by the slightest of movements in the thumb. If it weren't for this innovation hundreds of thousands of grannies the length and breadth of the country would struggle to pour tea. But thanks to it, they stay warm and hydrated. Isn't that amazing?
Take that all you silly teapots with handles on the top!
6. The Base
It's not so large as to lose heat excessively and not too narrow as to make the teapot unsteady. It is the Goldilocks size - Just right.
7. The Colour
Brown is the perfect colour for a teapot. It mirrors the colour of tea itself. It doesn't stain visibly and is unpretentious. It radiates an earthy and cosy warmth to it. The only possible alternative would be a rich Claret.
8. The aesthetics
It is, you will all agree, a thing of beauty.
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So the next time you make a nice cuppa tea, please spare a thought for all the thought (or lack of thought) that went into your teapot. There are few things in life more irritating than a bad teapot because it will annoy you incrementally more and more each time you have to suffer the indignity of a thing which cannot perform a simply task well. If this is you then it's time to face facts. If your bad teapot were an employee you would sack them. If it were a child you would clip them round the ear and tell them to buck up their ideas.
People of Up the Clarets I implore you: Do not suffer a bad teapot.
If this rings true to you then resolve right now to invest in a good teapot. You will never look back and you will cherish your teapot and rejoice more and more with each passing year that it serves you.
Rowls
