Cha Bu

20/11/2010, posted by Cha in journal

I picked the habbit of using a Cha Bu from Teamasters , a blog which has a big influence on me. It’s one of my most important source of  information, especially because I share the same philosophy on tea as Stephane, although I still have much to learn.  Still , even if I share the same philosophy, I now realize that my spirit of tea making is a bit different,  perhaps due to my martial arts background. (  I will talk about this when I will be ready to explain it with words .)

As I probably said in earlier post, a Cha Bu is much more versatile then a tea tray.  You can be much more creative and you can reflect your mood/feelings/spirit with ease by having the possibility to create almost unique setups according to the situation. A Cha Bu is easier to store than a tea tray  and you can easily make your own .  Having more than one Cha Bu gives you many possibilities. I would say, at some point, a Cha Bu becomes a must.

Besides creativity, I feel (as Stephane said on it’s blog) that I become more focused on the tea itself once I started to use a Cha Bu.  This is mostly because you will not have the luxury to spill water all over once you start to use it.  But there is always some excess of water, and for that, a teaboat is used in conjunction with a large bowl that stores the water used to wash the teapot and cups. When brewing with a gaiwan, the extra bowl is not always necessary.

Of course, good results can be obtained without a Cha Bu at all like in the previous examples.

With or without a Cha Bu , I find that not using a tea tray is very liberating.  However, that doesn’t mean I stopped using tea trays.  I am now somehow amused as I see a past version of me who imagined that a tea tray is a mandatory item to comfortably brew gong fu.

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