Caddy
An airtight container for storing leaf. Tea's enemies are air, light, moisture, heat and other smells, and the caddy is the answer to all five. It is also the one piece of teaware whose history is mostly about theft: eighteenth-century English caddies came with locks.
- Capacity
- 50 to 250 g of leaf
- Material
- lined tin, steel, ceramic, historically silver or wood
- Origin
- England from the eighteenth century, and everywhere since
- Best for
- everything except tea you mean to age
What it is
A lidded canister, historically wood, silver or porcelain, now usually a double-lidded tin or a ceramic jar with a rubber seal. The Georgian ones were lockable chests, and the key was kept by the mistress of the house. That was not eccentricity: import duties and the East India Company's monopoly kept tea extraordinarily expensive, so the household's tea was valuable enough to lock away from trusted servants. Silver caddy spoons for measuring it out appeared in the same century, often hidden in a sliding panel in the caddy itself.
What it does to your tea
It decides how long the tea stays what it was. Oxidation continues slowly in storage, aromatics escape, and dried leaf is hygroscopic enough to take up both moisture and smells from anything nearby. A tea stored in a clear jar on a sunny shelf next to the spice rack will be noticeably duller in weeks. There is one deliberate exception: raw puer is aged on purpose and wants some air exchange, so it is stored differently.
What it suits
Everything except tea you are deliberately ageing. Green and lightly oxidised teas benefit most, since they have the most to lose and lose it fastest.
How to use one
Fill it reasonably full, since a half-empty caddy is half air. Keep it out of sunlight, away from the cooker and away from strong-smelling foods. Do not refrigerate opened tea: taking a cold caddy into a warm kitchen condenses water onto the leaf. One caddy per tea, because leaf takes up neighbouring aromas readily.
How to choose one
A double lid, an inner seal or a proper gasket, and opaque walls. Steel and lined tin are inert; unlined copper and brass are not. A ceramic jar with a cork or clamp seal is fine and looks better. Size it to what you actually drink in a couple of months rather than to what fits the shelf.
Care and cleaning
Empty and wipe dry rather than washing, and never store tea in a caddy that is even slightly damp. A caddy that has held a strongly scented tea, jasmine or a smoked black, will keep that smell and should stay with that kind of tea.
What people get wrong
Clear glass jars on an open shelf. They are the most common storage in enthusiast kitchens and they fail on two of the five counts at once, light and, if the seal is a loose lid, air. The other one is buying a large caddy and keeping it a third full.
What it is made of
