Yixing Purple Clay Teapot Culture---The method of use and care Yixing teapot

Yixing teapot give the best flavor when used in gong-fu, even really casual gong-fu enforces just a little bit of ceremony on the drinkers, because you drink short, small stepping out of small cups. Small cups means you have to sip your tea (savor it, taste it), instead of just drinking out of a mug.
It’s the difference between drinking to quench thirst and drinking to appreciate tastes, flavors, textures. This is tea as an experience as opposed to tea as a beverage. Tea that tastes with care will always taste better, because you are paying attention to it. You are looking for the good things in the cup, and so they are easier to find. It just tastes better, which is awesome.

The reason of care your Yixing teapot

Since only Yixing teapots contain thousands of air holes or micro-air pores, besides being able to keep the hot water hot for a longer time and brew teas better, these air holes can also self seasoning the teapot by absorbing the aroma from the tea. These characteristics can only be found in the purple sand, therefore, Yixing teapots are most used by the serious tea drinkers.

Serious tea drinker like myself, I have been using one teapot for only one type of tea in order not to mix-up with the tea aroma in that teapot. Normal tea drinkers may find using two or three Yixing teapots sufficient, one for green tea(but make sure to cool your water temperature), second one for Oolong tea and a third one for black tea. Brewing a cup of good tea has many factors besides using a good Yixing teapot, different tea requires different methods to brew, When purchased a new Yixing teapot, do not use it to brew tea right the way, it needs to be treated with preparation work in order to have these air holes functioning properly in the purple sand.

An Yixing pot is at heart an extremely fine, specialized tool. Compare it to a fine chef’s knife. If you’re going to invest in a good knife and you really care about having one that cuts well for you, then you might as well get a good one. You also have to make sure you’re caring for it properly. For a knife, this will mean using a wet stone and a steel often to keep the blade sharp and straight, not just an automate sharpener once or twice a year. This is what I meant when I spoke of raising and cultivating a tea pot. I was speaking of the technical act of actually caring for the teapot well in order to make good tea, not of fetishizing or anthropomorphizing an object unnecessarily.

Since the Yixing clay has the unique characteristic of absorbing the flavor of your tea, washing with soap will take away from that unique quality.so never clean Yixing teapots with any detergents or cleaning agents, just rinse with hot water after each use would be sufficient, pat dry with soft towels if preferred, leave the lid uncovered till it is fully dried. Tea stains may build up on your teapot after many used, don’t worry about getting it off, collectors are always looking for tea stains as this is one of the characteristics required for a good old and antique teapot. Avoid having dust and grease get to the teapot. We have seen a good old teapot which has scaling tea stains, to a collector’s point of view, this kind of Yixing teapots worth much more value and is rare to find.

If you’re not already doing this to your yixing teapot, here’s what I might recommend.

1. After you remove all of the tea leaves, do a quick swish with boiling water to make sure you’ve removed all of the small debris. Empty it out.

2. Then, pour fresh boiling water into the yixing teapot and cover with the lid. Pour boiling water over the pot, too. Let this sit for a few minutes (until the pot is cooler to touch).

3. Pour out the water, making sure to check inside for small debris again. Don’t pour it all out right away.. save a little bit to swish and pour out of the top (rather than the spout).

4. Then pour in just boiled water, replace the lid, and pour boiling water over the pot one more time. Pour our right away, and remove the lid.

Using boiling water as a “rinse” should help with 1) finding any little particles and getting rid of them.. 2) Making sure that the last thing to touch the pot was super hot so that it evaporates very quickly (instead of cool water that sits and evaporates over two days). The boiled water should evaporate off the hot pot within a minute. I find this more ideal than will water evaporate off of a cold or room temperature pot, since no dampness can stick around in the dark, cool recesses of the pot and spout.

At this point, you can also take a very clean piece of cloth or suede (you can even dedicate one to your Yixing teapots) to lightly rub the outside of your pot. If you do have hard water, this will help to even out any water residue. You can even have a little bowl of boiling hot water to (lightly!) dip the cloth in and rub on the outside of the pot.
Finally, you could even use a dry part of that cloth to pat away moisture left on the inside of the yixing teapot.
All of these things should help the yixing teapot dry quickly, without tiny leaf residue, and with less hard-water buildup (or at least more evenly distributed build-up). None of these are required, and you can experiment with what works for you, but since you’re having so many issues with mold, I would suggest doing as many of these steps as you can, and then slowly removing whatever steps don’t work for you over time.
One more quick tip:

be sure you’re checking the spout for loose leaf debris. Sometimes small particles can get stuck in the filters. I find bobby pins (with the end-protectors removed) or thing pu’er needles (or just plain needles!) helpful for getting in there and manually removing anything that doesn’t want to come out with blasting water wrong way through the spout.