Good Quality Starter Tea Set That Will Get You Going With Gongfu Brewing!
I got this set to have as a base reference for what a teaset should be, since I did not know much about gongfu tea before I got this set, and I had been wasting my money buying incomplete or nonfunctional items. This set, basically has everything a basic tea set ought to have, and nothing extra. It's not perfect, but is completely acceptable and works well.Included is:1 bowl with lid and saucer,1 sharing cup,1 porcelain tea strainer,1 teapot funnel,6 tasting cups,1 pair of forceps, and1 towel.Notably, there is a lacking of a tea tray, which is actually expensive to get separately, and very useful when you have so many pieces of teaware to move around with this package. If you want to use your own tea tray that is fine, but don't expect to be saving money by getting it separately. If you don't already have one, you would probably be better off getting a more expensive set that includes a tea tray already. This is a beginner mistake.The forceps are absolute worst part of this kit, and are garbage that should be thrown in the trash immediately. They don't grab the tea cups well at all, and you are much more likely to just drop stuff between the smooth porcelain and the smooth metal. The wooden tongs I got with a different set work properly. So this is just laziness on the part of the seller and a ding on the value of this set. This is not a "formal" tea set yet, with absolutely all the bells and whistles, so including tongs is really not even necessary. Having no tongs at all would leave a better impression than having cheap tongs that don't work.There is no sniffing cup in this set either, so it is not an absolutely "complete" tea set, but sniffing cups are a fairly modern and upscale piece not universally used in all Chinese tea traditions, so it's fine that this set lacks that piece of equipment. That's more of an Aficionado's piece of kit that sits better in a fancy tea kit. This is more of an everyday utilitarian set.I personally was overjoyed though, at the quality of the porcelain strainer and the pot funnel that come with this set! The strainer is 100% porcelain, with many tiny holes poked into it, so it does work properly. Other sets, if the even come with a porcelain strainer, the cheaper strainers would have a porcelain funnel, with a metal insert glued on, so this is a step up in quality and a feature that I really really like!The inclusion of the tea pot funnel is bizarre, since this set comes with a lidded bowl infuser instead of a teapot infuser. As it is, it just gets used as a stand for the strainer, which really ought to come with a saucer instead. I am still happy the tea funnel is present, since the other tea set that I bought separately that DID come with an actual pot infuser didn't come with a tea funnel! So lot of these tea sets you find online really don't make any sense.Anyway, the tea towel that came with this set is not very absorbent still, but it is better quality than the towels included in any other tea set I've had, so this is still a superior feature, if not actually a great one still.Finally the actual lidded bowl and cups. The bowl and cups are all nice sizes -- still small -- but useable sized. They are however, still not proportional to each other. The bowl and sharing cup are too small for the number of cups included. As it is, the bowl and sharing cup will serve 3/6 of the cups included, which is usable, but still dismal.I had to get a separate tray and larger tea bowl and sharing cup separately to match the tasting cups. This makes the tea set kind of a waste still. But most of the teaware sets on Amazon share this same feature flaw, mismatched bowls to cup sizes, so I don't want to give to much emphasis to that.You are not likely to find a single premade set that gets the basic proportions right. If the tea bowl and serving cup were 33% larger, and it came with 4 cups instead of 6 cups then this would be the correct dimensions. You could get a tea bowl and sharing cup that would serve all 6 cups -- I did -- but those are fairly large already and are definitely more cumbersome to use. A 4 cup set is basically perfect size for ease of handling with one hand, and a 3 cup set is also a good traditional size.A final criticism is that the lid on the tea bowl could be smaller. It's quite slippery, and a smaller lid would sit deeper in the bowl, where you could get a nice water seal on the bowl while brewing. If you tried to do that with this configuration, you would end up overfilling the bowl, and likely burn yourself on the teaware, as well as spill liquid too easily. This is a fine detail, the bowl is usable, but a small change in dimensions would make this tea bowl set even more competent.Overall while not perfect, this set is perfectly useable and is and the quality is high. I've made good tea with it -- of all sorts -- and this is the baseline set against which I judge my other tea ware. The porcelain strainer that comes with this is outstanding and is highest quality piece in this set. I wish I could get more of those separately.
✔ Verified Purchase
