I've been asked to think about how herbal tea drinkers might be able to enjoy the company of a teapet. Teapets are a 1000 year old gong fu cha tradition where clay teapot makers made little figurerines from leftover clay. They are given the first wash steep we do with loose leaf tea to wake up the leaves before they give their flavour. The tea leaves a nice patina on the clay, and the oils will make them really shiny over a long time. It's called raising a teapet.

How this might work with herbs. Herbs could leave a nice smell in porous clay, or a cool color on porcelain or a light glaze, provided one single tea is only used for the one teapet or only tea that gives of the same colour perhaps ?But there are also teapets that don't need camellia sinensis aka tea per se. They are bubbling teapets, color changing ones, and spitting teapets. They just need hot and, in the case of spitting pets, cold water, then hot.

I've not done any real experiments with this since I don't often drink herbal teas unless I'm sick. for a while when I was only able to drink camomile, I had a porous clay teapet specially for it and it smelled of honey until I started giving it regular tea. It no longer smells of honey. Granted, I did not feed it solely camomile for very long. Maybe if I had done that for years, the smell could have locked in, but I do not know.

Maybe you guys could come up with ideas as to how to actually put this in practice since I've noticed most of you just put herbs in a cup and that it. this is nothing like the gong fu method where you have everything in place allready and all you do extra is put a teapet on your chapan (teatray) and give it your first wash, which you would otherwise trow away anyways. What I did when I drank camomile was the same as I do with tea mostly because I needed to go through the motions of gong fu cha "ritual" since that is very relaxing to me but I just could not bare even a little caffeine at the time so I just replaced it with camomile to relax me some more.

Because I'm a crazy person I just bought three new teapets from aliexpress (it will take 2 to 3 weeks untill they arrive) it would be helpfull to know what the most popular herbs are and what brewing methods you guys use so I can experiment a little for you. I would love to know what you guys think and it would also be cool if some of you might join me in this little herbal teapet experiment. 

Teapets for herbal tea maybe ?