Why a whole site just for glass
We started tea.glass because most tea shops treat glassware as an afterthought — a stray pitcher next to the gaiwans, a single mug in a corner. For a certain kind of drinker, that is exactly backwards. If you brew a Bái Háo Yín Zhēn (白毫银针), watching the silver needles stand up and sink is half the tea. If you steep a Jú Huā (菊花) blooming ball or a young raw shēng pǔ’ěr (生普洱), opaque ware hides the best part of the session. Glass is not a compromise material. For visual teas, it is the correct one.
Our mission is narrow and honest. We curate glass vessels for chinese tea — gaiwans, faircups, side-handle brewers, double-wall cups, tall straight glasses for grandpa-style — and we explain, in plain language, which teas reward each shape. We don’t sell yixing here (that lives on tea.equipment), we don’t pretend to be a department store, and we don’t carry novelty pieces that look good on a shelf and crack on the second pour.
We care about three things, in this order. First, thermal honesty: borosilicate that survives a real kettle, lids that don’t shatter at temperature shock, walls thick enough to hold heat but thin enough to read the liquor. Second, geometry: a faircup that pours cleanly, a gaiwan with a rim you can actually hold at 95 °C, a brewer whose filter doesn’t choke on whole-leaf oolong. Third, transparency in the literal and editorial sense — clear glass, clear sourcing notes, clear pricing. If a piece comes from a workshop in Jinan or a small studio in Kyoto, we say so. If it is unbranded factory ware that happens to be excellent value, we say that too.
About half of tea.glass is articles, not products. Guides on which teas brew best in glass, how to clean stained pitchers without bleach, why your gaiwan lid sticks, what to look for in second-hand pieces. The shop exists to fund the writing, and the writing exists to make the shop honest. That balance — roughly fifty-fifty — is a deliberate choice across the constellation.
How the project started
tea.glass began as a side note inside a much larger project. While building thetea.app — the encyclopedia at the centre of our constellation — we kept hitting the same problem in tasting sessions: photographing a white tea or a jasmine pearl in porcelain meant losing the part that actually convinced people to try it. We bought glass. Then we bought more glass. Then we started lending it to friends, then to the photo team, then to a small group of beta readers who wanted to brew along.
By 2023 we had a shelf of vetted pieces, a folder of rejection notes (chips after one wash, lid rims that scalded fingers, etched logos that wouldn’t come off in a dishwasher), and a clear feeling that this deserved its own home rather than a sub-category buried in a bigger shop. tea.glass launched as the first single-material site in the constellation. The constraint turned out to be the point: when a catalogue is small enough to read in one sitting, every piece in it has to earn its slot.
Sourcing and the people behind the glass
We work with three kinds of suppliers. Studio makers in Jingdezhen, Jinan and a handful of japanese workshops, where pieces are blown or pressed in small runs and we can usually name the maker. Mid-size manufacturers — the same factories that quietly produce ware for several well-known european brands — where we negotiate directly and skip the markup. And a small number of vintage pieces that pass through our hands when collectors downsize.
Every supplier relationship starts the same way: a sample order on our own money, a month of daily use in our Saint Petersburg and Berlin studios, and a written note from at least two people on whether they would brew with it again. Pieces that pass go into the catalogue with a real photograph (not a renderer), measured capacity, weight, and an honest line about who it suits. Pieces that fail go into a private archive that occasionally surfaces as a guide on what not to buy.
We don’t take payment from suppliers for placement. We don’t run sponsored reviews. If we praise a faircup, it’s because we have stained one with three years of Fèng Huáng Dān Cōng (凤凰单丛) and still reach for it first.
Where tea.glass fits in the constellation
tea.glass is one of 36 sites built by Teamotea — a deliberately decentralised approach to tea on the web. Instead of one giant catalogue trying to be everything, each site does one thing and links generously to the others. If you want the encyclopedia entry on a tea, you go to thetea.app. If you want to learn brewing properly, that lives at tea.school. Pu-erh deserves its own world, so it has puerh.app and shop.puerh.app. Clay teapots, kettles, scales and the rest of the gongfu kit are at tea.equipment. Free samples, when we have them, go out through tea.gratis.
The pattern is the same everywhere: narrow scope, deep coverage, shared voice. tea.glass cross-links into the network anywhere it helps the reader — a guide on white tea will point you to the encyclopedia entry, a brewer listing will mention the matching kettle on tea.equipment. You’re never stuck inside one shop trying to learn something it can’t teach you.
Transparency, in practice
A few specifics, because vague promises are easy. Every product page lists weight in grams, capacity in millilitres, and material spec (borosilicate grade where relevant). We publish the country of origin and, when the maker permits, the workshop. Prices include VAT for EU buyers and are shown in the currency you are browsing from — no surprise at checkout. Shipping is calculated, not flat-rate-with-padding. Returns are 30 days for any reason, including ‘I changed my mind about the shape.’
On the editorial side: every guide is signed, dated, and updated when our opinion changes. If we get something wrong, we leave the original visible with a correction note. Reader questions go to a real inbox monitored by the team listed below, not a ticket system that funnels into nothing.