Why ware changes the cup
Reprocessed tea is not one thing. It covers scented tea, where flowers are worked through a green or white base, and compressed tea, which is a dark tea pressed into shape.
Those two halves want opposite ware, and this is the only category where choosing without thinking first will reliably waste the tea.
Scented tea is about aroma, and aroma is fragile. It wants the same neutral, thin walled ware that green tea wants.
Compressed tea is about extraction over time. It wants the thick walled, heat retaining ware that dark tea wants, because that is effectively what it is.
The giveaway is usually on the package. Scented tea is sold loose and smells strongly before you brew it. Compressed tea comes as a cake, brick or tuo cha and smells faint and earthy.
If you are still unsure after looking, brew it and count. Scented tea peaks in the first two steeps and fades. Compressed tea is still improving at steep six.
None of this is obvious from the name on the packet, which is why reprocessed tea is the category people most often brew in the wrong vessel.
Best ware for Reprocessed tea
For scented tea, use a porcelain gaiwan of 100 to 150 millilitres or a glass tumbler. Three grams, water at 85 degrees, 45 seconds.
Glass is particularly good for jasmine pearls, which unfurl into a flower shape. That is more than theatre, because it shows you when the aroma has released.
For compressed tea, use a 200 millilitre ceramic or clay pot. Five grams, a full boil, a five second rinse, then 20 second steeps.
An insulated flask suits the compressed half well. Five grams in 500 millilitres of boiling water, sipped over several hours.
If you drink both halves, keep two vessels. Sharing one is the fastest route to jasmine scented pu-erh or pu-erh flavoured jasmine.
For jasmine specifically, a tall glass beats a wide one. The aroma collects in the headspace above the liquor and you meet it as you lift the glass.
For compressed tea, a ceramic pot with a wide mouth is easiest. Bricks break into irregular chunks, and a narrow mouth means crushing them further to fit.
For iced jasmine, cold brew works better than hot brew over ice. Twenty grams in a litre of cold water, eight hours in the fridge, keeps the aroma intact.
What to avoid
Avoid unglazed clay for scented tea. The whole point is the floral aroma, and clay absorbs it within a few sessions and hands it back at random.
Avoid thin glass for the compressed half. It cannot hold the heat a brick needs before it opens.
Avoid small infusers for either half. Jasmine pearls swell a great deal and compressed chunks expand further, and both need room.
Avoid storing the two halves side by side in one cupboard. A cake sitting next to a tin of jasmine will smell of jasmine within weeks.
Avoid plastic infusers on the scented half. Jasmine oil clings to plastic and no amount of washing removes it, so it will taint whatever you brew next.
Avoid hot rinses on the scented half. A five second rinse belongs to compressed tea, and doing it to jasmine throws away the layer you paid for.
The one rule
Identify which half you have before you choose anything. Petals in the leaf means scented, a solid pressed shape means compressed, and the ware follows from that.
When a jasmine tastes like plain green tea, your water was too hot or your vessel held too much heat, and the aroma went with it.
When a compressed tea tastes flat, you rinsed too long, used too little leaf, or brewed it in something that shed heat too fast.
This is the only category with no single right answer. It has two, and they are opposites.
One test: brew 3 grams of jasmine pearls in glass and again in a clay pot you already use for pu-erh. The glass version smells floral, the clay one largely does not.
Because the two halves differ this much, the sensible purchase is two cheap vessels rather than one good one. That is the reverse of the usual advice, and it is right here.