Ceramic Teapot Sets

Ceramic teapots, and when they beat glass

Ceramic is the better choice when the pot has to stay hot. The wall is thicker and less conductive than glass, so a full ceramic pot will still be pouring drinkable tea forty minutes in, where a glass one has gone tepid. If you brew once and drink across a morning, this is the material you want.

The trade-off is that you cannot see in. You brew by timer rather than by colour, which takes a couple of goes to calibrate and then stops being a problem.

Sets, not single pots

Everything on this page arrives as a set — the pot plus three matching cups, and in the travel packs a padded case as well. That is deliberate: a ceramic pot is the piece of teaware people give as a gift, and a matched set is a better gift than a lone pot. It also means the cups are the right size for what the pot pours.

Glaze and shape

The temple forms are the quieter option, in deep blue and orange-earth glazes. The animal and character pots are the ones that get commented on. Both are the same body and capacity underneath — the choice is entirely about what you want sitting on the table.

Care

Hand wash, and avoid thermal shock: don’t take a cold pot straight from a cupboard and fill it with boiling water. Warm it with a splash of hot water first, tip that out, then brew. This is worth doing anyway, because a pre-warmed pot holds temperature better through the steep.

Related

If you would rather watch the leaves than keep the heat, see the glass infuser teapots. The full range is under teapots with infusers.