I'm resuming a shopping trip I originally made in September for my first Yixing pot. Ideally, this would be a flexible, standard sized, standard shaped, no-frills but decently made Yixing. I'd like to buy it specifically for Pu-Erh in general since I really can't afford a Yixing per tea at the moment. In the course of my shopping I came across many, many vendors where the Yixing pots were either very expensive, or of dubious construct if the price was right. The only store I've found so far that sells an appropriately priced and well recommended Yixing, and conveniently accessible, is Rishi. At $30-$40 it seems like I can get a good, standard, beginner, staple Yixing.
Any thoughts before I take the modest plunge?
I don`t know much about yixings, but yunnan sourcing is one of the best, there are so many factory made pots, so many have bad smell that indicates bad quality clay and bad quality not handmade teapot, I bought only one teapot from YS, it had no bad smell, I boiled it for an hour without tealeaves, and one hour with tealeaves, and it took up the aroma, I can only recommend Da Hong Pao clay, about the rest I don`t know.
i really like my rishi yixing too. i have the high handle one so its kind of an odd design but it's one of the smaller ones (you should make sure to pay attention to the volume, some of them look good but are really big for normal gongfu use). mine also had a smell to it but i didn't consider it negative, it kind of smelled like a really fragrant tea shop that sells yixings and a lot of herbal flavored tisanes; but it went away very fast. i use mine for darker oolongs and i love it. it also passes the old cover the air hole and see if it stops pouring test very well.
I just ordered a few pots from NadaCha, I will let you know how it goes.
I have several pots from YSLLC and one from Rishi. I don't have any complaints with their performance, but many of them are too large for solo wrong fu cha. It would probably be nice to have decent pots at a larger size for company -- a 130ml pot only gets me one small cup for myself, and a bit poured over the pot.
I guess the OP was mainly asking about Rishi, so I will just say try to pick one of the ones that are 6.8 oz or smaller. I have the Duan Ni Crown Pearl, which I later found to be also used by Stephane Erler for shu puerh. I honestly rarely use this pot, most of its life has been failed attempts to "wrong fu" hong cha.
I have several pots from YSLLC and one from Rishi. I don't have any complaints with their performance, but many of them are too large for solo wrong fu cha. It would probably be nice to have decent pots at a larger size for company -- a 130ml pot only gets me one small cup for myself, and a bit poured over the pot.
I guess the OP was mainly asking about Rishi, so I will just say try to pick one of the ones that are 6.8 oz or smaller. I have the Duan Ni Crown Pearl, which I later found to be also used by Stephane Erler for shu puerh. I honestly rarely use this pot, most of its life has been failed attempts to "wrong fu" hong cha.
I bought the duanni shi piao pot from Rishi ~ eight months ago and was happy enough with it that I bought another. Mine did have a smell to it but it went away very quickly...in like two or three days. I actually liked the smell, it wasn't wierd like a chemical/solvent smell....it smelled kinda like lemongrass/vanilla to me.wyardley wrote:One problem is that most of theirs (except for a few, like the duanni shi piao) are pretty big. The pots aren't bad, but they do have a very weird smell that takes quite a while to go away.
Eight months ago the CS woman at Rishi told me that they had received many requests for smaller pots. At the time they had just gotten their current stock in. I got the impression that they would be purchasing smaller sizes the next round.... let's hope!