I couldn’t find much information about the Tea Drop before buying one, so I’m going to write a long review to inform future potential buyers.
It works in a simple way. You put your tea leaves and water in the bowl at the top, and a container on the wooden platform below the bowl. The bowl has a very small hole in the bottom, covered by a filter. As the tea steeps, the liquid drains out of the bottom of the bowl into the container. It reminds me of a sand timer.
I gather that there are different types of bowl, which have different sized holes and so drain at different speeds. Mine takes four minutes to empty, and it works well for most black teas.
The bowl is the size of a large mug.
It’s very well constructed. Bearing in mind that this is locally made, and not mass produced, it’s good value.
It came with a spare filter.
I see three advantages to this way of brewing:
(1) The tea is good! The tea leaves have a good deal of room to unfold and move around.
(2) It’s very convenient. All you need to do is put your mug on the platform, and put the tea and water in the bowl. You don’t need a timer, and you don’t need to do anything to stop the brew. The bowl is easy to clean: it’s like cleaning a small glass teapot. Because the bowl is made of thin glass, I don’t find it necessary to pre-heat it.
(3) It looks great! You can see the leaves open and dance around in the water. It’s also a conversation piece.
There is one significant shortcoming to the system: you can’t control the duration of the brew, which limits its utility. In particular, the Tea Drop isn’t great for multiple infusions. Usually your second infusion is longer than your first, and your third infusion is longer still, and so on. In the Tea Drop, you can’t control the brew time, and so all your infusions will be of equal duration.
