Are tea pets silly? No, they are very clever.
I like tea. I’ve been getting into the Chinese style of tea making (known as gongfu which is hilariously just another transliteration of kung fu). You can read why here. It involves many 10-30 second brews in a tiny teapot, poured into tiny cups.
Part of this tradition of tea making are tea pets. These are ceramic animals or other figurines that you bring out with your tea set. The first steep you do is poured on your little guy, and you don’t drink it.
You might get that this is a cute thing to do, but also wonder why you’d waste good tea. The reasoning is that the first steep is quite weak. When using tea bags, the tea inside is usually tea processing waste - broken shards that are very small. There is a lot of surface area per volume, so they give up all their tea compounds immediately to the water. When using (usually higher quality) loose-leaf tea, the tea is normally in its whole leaf form that is dried. There’s much less surface area, and so it takes time for water to penetrate and extract all the tea compounds. The first steep gets compounds out of the surface, but is only starting to hydrate the inner parts of the leaf. This is even more true for compressed teas, like tea cakes or dragon balls.
So yes the first steep is weaker, and having a tea pet seems fun, but my immediate thought to pouring off the first brew was that this is an unnecessary hassle that can be ignored. Like the first cup might be weaker, but it’s still good tea, I wouldn’t have to deal with yet another god damn item on a tea tray, and I wouldn’t have to deal with disposing of this extra liquid. It seems way easier just to drink it.
After a year of this, I recently got gifted a tea pet. I think it makes drinking tea a lot better.
If you drink the first steep, your flavor experience goes from nothing, to half, to full (on the second steep). However, if you get rid of the first steep, your palate goes from nothing to full-on flavor. This is much more exciting, there is no ramp up. You are hit in the face with what the tea has to offer right away. You notice more notes, and you don’t second guess yourself, wondering if more flavors will come later. You also don’t subconsciously write off the tea immediately if it’s too uninteresting in the wash steep.
So the experience is better if you get rid of the wash. However, the human brain doesn’t like wasting things (I have written about this here). So, if you frame it instead as an “offering” to a tea pet, and make it a cute little ritual, it tricks your brain into accepting it.
This works, and is very clever and cool.