I never used to be a fan of glass tea cups until I tried them for the first time. Being able to see the tea infuse and the rich colours and whisps through the wall of the cup is refreshing in itself! Here’s just 5 of my favourite glass tea cups and sets.
Frosted Blown Glass Tea Cup
These small glass tea cups are a fantastic addition to your favourite teapot. They were hand-crafted using a technique that adds small bubbles in the bottom of the glass cup. The bubble patterns are unique from cup to cup and makes each one an exceptional tea cup. This is art, but also a functional glass tea cup that you can enjoy for years.
You’d think something this delightful and delicate looking couldn’t cope without kid gloves but its fully dishwasher safe.
Only available at Teavana.
Bodum Insulated Glass Tea Cups
Glass is a poor conductor of heat anyway so glass tea cups often keep your tea warmer for longer. These insulated glass tea cups from Bodum have a double wall though which means your tea stays hot for much longer. They come with a stainless steel saucer too and being glass blown they look great and show off the tea brilliantly.
From Shop.com.
Petit Fleur Suspendu Glass Tea Cup Set
These wonderful cups have an almost fragile appearance, but the borosilicate glass they are made of is strong and durable. They have a pocket of air between the inner glass wall and outer glass wall to insulate the tea and keep it hot. These are similar in shape to the Bodum cups but they have a wonderfully light printed floral pattern on the outside. It is just enough to show flowers when tea is in the cup. They come as a set of 4 5oz cups.
From Teavana.
Japanese White Pebble Glass Tea Cup
These cups are all the way from Japan and hand-made by a famous artesian glass blowing workshop. These unique glass tea cups have a circle of white dots around the rim for a unique finishing touch. They are all mouth blown glass cups, so each is a completely unique tea cup that you will treasure for a lifetime. It is a great way to start your own tea set and I have some myself!
From Teavana.
Basic Glass Tea Cup and Saucer
This is a nice basic but stylish glass tea cup with matching saucer. Made of tempered glass, which is very sturdy and able to withstand high temperatures and dishwashers. These tea cups are great to have as your everyday cups with a low cost and simple design.
Adagio Teas.
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This is a fantastic picture. Such clean simplicity and I love the tempting chocolate chip cake just out of focus in the back. Fantastic.
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I spotted this great picture on Flickr earlier today titled: Zen Tea.
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Dodecahydron Tea Strainer
On perusing the internet earlier today I came across this incredible piece of workmanship by Arnold Patrick Martin – A US metal smith whose other works are well worth a gander.
I don’t think it can be bought as I think its a custom-built piece but I would absolutely love to own one of these. I can imagine Victorian England and Edgar Alan Poe all catapulted to a post apocalyptic world where tea is sold on the black market as a life enhancing herb. This is quite possibly one of the best pieces of tea-art I’ve seen since starting this blog.
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George Orwell on Tea
This is a truly awesome piece of writing by one of England’s greatest authors. George Orwell is more famed for his dystopian epic 1984 but he also wrote in one of his many essays a discourse on the subject of tea.
I’ve copied the full extract from his book below for you all to read:
If you look up ‘tea’ in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points.This is curious, not only because tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country, as well as in Eire, Australia and New Zealand, but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.
When I look through my own recipe for the perfect cup of tea, I find no fewer than eleven outstanding points. On perhaps two of them there would be pretty
general agreement, but at least four others are acutely controversial. Here
are my own eleven rules, every one of which I regard as golden:
- First of all, one should use Indian or Ceylonese tea. China tea has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays — it is economical, and one can drink it without milk — but there is not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more optimistic after drinking it. Anyone who has used that comforting phrase ‘a nice cup of tea’ invariably means Indian tea.
- Secondly, tea should be made in small quantities — that is, in a teapot. Tea out of an urn is always tasteless, while army tea, made in a cauldron, tastes of grease and whitewash. The teapot should be made of china or earthenware. Silver or Britanniaware teapots produce inferior tea and enamel pots are worse; though curiously enough a pewter teapot (a rarity nowadays) is not so bad.
- Thirdly, the pot should be warmed beforehand. This is better done by placing it on the hob than by the usual method of swilling it out with hot water.
- Fourthly, the tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right. In a time of rationing, this is not an idea that can be realized on every day of the week, but I maintain that one strong cup of tea is better than twenty weak ones. All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes — a fact which is
recognized in the extra ration issued to old-age pensioners.
- Fifthly, the tea should be put straight into the pot. No strainers, muslin bags or other devices to imprison the tea. In some countries teapots are fitted with little dangling baskets under the spout to catch the stray leaves, which are supposed to be harmful. Actually one can swallow tea-leaves in considerable quantities without ill effect, and if the tea is not loose in the pot it never infuses properly.
- Sixthly, one should take the teapot to the kettle and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours. Some people add that one should only use water that has been freshly brought to the boil, but I have never noticed that it makes any difference.
- Seventhly, after making the tea, one should stir it, or better, give the pot a good shake, afterwards allowing the leaves to settle.
- Eighthly, one should drink out of a good breakfast cup — that is, the cylindrical type of cup, not the flat, shallow type. The breakfast cup holds more, and with the other kind one’s tea is always half cold before one has well started on it.
- Ninthly, one should pour the cream off the milk before using it for tea. Milk that is too creamy always gives tea a sickly taste.
- Tenthly, one should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject. The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round.
- Lastly, tea — unless one is drinking it in the Russian style — should be drunk without sugar. I know very well that I am in a minority here. But still, how can you call yourself a true tealover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it? It would be equally reasonable to put in pepper or salt. Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant
to be bitter. If you sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar; you could make a very similar drink by dissolving sugar in plain hot water.Some people would answer that they don’t like tea in itself, that they only drink it in order to be warmed and stimulated, and they need sugar to take the taste away. To those misguided people I would say: Try drinking tea without sugar for, say, a fortnight and it is very unlikely that you will ever want to ruin your tea by sweetening it again.
These are not the only controversial points to arise in connexion with tea drinking, but they are sufficient to show how subtilized the whole business has become. There is also the mysterious social etiquette surrounding the teapot (why is it considered vulgar to drink out of your saucer, for instance?) and much might be written about the subsidiary uses of tealeaves, such as telling
fortunes, predicting the arrival of visitors, feeding rabbits, healing burns and sweeping the carpet. It is worth paying attention to such details as warming the pot and using water that is really boiling, so as to make quite sure of wringing out of one’s ration the twenty good, strong cups of that two ounces, properly handled, ought to represent.
- Taken from The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 3, 1943-45
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This photo was originally taken during the winter months for its warmth and simplicity. I think it fits at any time of the year though.
Tea is Love
The photographer is janisDA
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art
I’ve always been a fan of DeviantArt – for those not in the know its an online art community for independent artists to upload their pieces and have the community comment, buy and guide each other. Its an absolutely incredible source of art and completely blows out of the water the idea that art is something for the elite minority. Art is truly independent, free and beautiful on this site.
As such I’ve been perusing the pages at DA looking for tea in art and have come across a few artists who’ve been great emotional movers. Not all of these artists do just tea – in fact very few do! But they’ve contributed something tea related in at least on of their works. I’d recommend viewing their gallery for some incredible examples.
My first one is Emilia Stasiak who titled the piece below: Tea Time
The lighting and composition here is perfect and the fact the artist has allowed to bubbles to stay on the surface of the tea resisting the urge to pop or shift them out of frame shows a naturalness most often lost in the goal for neatness.
You can view the rest of her gallery here: Emilia Stasiak
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Mr Gladstone was one of the greatest Prime Ministers of the UK from the late 19th Century. Often being the inspiration for other greats like Winston Churchill. He was very fond of his tea and I recently stumbled across a poem he wrote during his PM years that goes:
Tea, The Cure – All
If you are cold, tea will warm you.
If you are too heated, tea will cool you.
If you are too depressed, tea will cheer you.
If you are too exhausted, tea will calm you!
I think he made a better politician than a poet but his sentiment about the great leaf is very true indeed.
William Gladstones autobiography can be obtained at Amazon.
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