We recommend cleaning your teapot with just water. Just throw the tea leaves out soon after you have finished using them. Rinse the pot until there are no more leaves in the pot. Wipe dry with a clean cloth, and leave to dry until next use.
Over time your kyusu will develop tea stains with regular use. These brown color stains are fine and expected, and they will not hurt the character of your tea.
Each of our kyusu is meant for use with tea only. If you use your kyusu to brew other teas besides green teas it may eventually develop an aroma of those other teas. This is especially true with teas with added fragrances, and teas (tisanes or herbal teas) that are made not from the tea leaf.
You can try these options to dislodge these leaves.
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Pour water in through the spout, close the lid with water inside, and then shake to try to dislodge any leaves from the filter.
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Let the teapot dry completely. Then fill with boiling water, which can flush out any leaves stuck in the filter.
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Gently brush the filter with a toothbrush to remove leaves. Be careful—these handmade filters can break with vigorous scrubbing!
Since each chasen is made by hand from bamboo, it will not last forever.
How do we know when it’s time to replace a chasen? Look at the tips. If you can see a lot of broken tips, and if you can’t whisk matcha with it as easily as you once could, it is probably time to get a new one.
The chasen can develop a crack in the handle portion over time, and sometimes even before purchase. There is nothing wrong with your chasen if it has a crack in it. Cracks will form naturally in the bamboo due to changes in humidity, and they do not affect the performance of the whisk.
If the cracks look like a spiderweb and are a light amber color, there's a good chance that these are aesthetic cracks in the glaze called Kan'nyu.
The Matcha bowl (Cream) and the Matcha Bowl with Spout (White) have a beautiful spiderweb-like crack pattern in the glaze that is almost invisible at first. Over time, the more you make matcha in the bowl, the more this pattern will emerge in a light amber color. The pattern is called kan’nyu, and for centuries tea lovers have praised it as a sign of a well-loved matcha bowl.
Kan’nyu forms at the end of the firing process. After firing, the bowl is allowed to cool down to room temperature. The glaze cools down and solidifies at a different rate than the ceramic underneath, causing the kan’nyu to form. The pattern is just in the glaze itself, not in the ceramic underneath, which remains structurally sound.
