This episode, I drink a tea that is currently being sourced by some tea friends on their new project Teas We Like. The tea has been aged in Taiwan and is well-balanced, decently potent, with a strong huigan that mixes a lot of positive traits into a solid session.
Rating: 6.7
This tea is being sold or being “sourced”
Both?
The terms are opposite!
They source it from one place and sell it on Teas We Like. Not unlike how Yunnan Sourcing acquires tea (sources) from different places and sells it.
Thanks
I am curious, had the tea been “curated”?
Presumably it means the people involved with TWL collect, select and offer puerh for customer enjoyment that they consider good quality and value.
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/curate2
Hi Grumpy,
This reminds me a lot of an old post by Andy Couturier where he was outraged that someone used what he thought was the extremely pretentious verb “sourcing” to describe finding a source for a hard-to-find tea.
We actually don’t use the term “sourcing” on our website, but we do sometimes use the term “curating”. The reason is that we test a lot of different teas and storages of teas (not only tasting them ourselves but also getting outside opinions) and follow many different leads and suggestions from friends and collectors until we find a tea which we feel is really exemplary in its category and at a good price. Only in that case would we be confident in selling the tea.
Also, we sometimes will have a collector or maker who will prepare a tasting set from teas he/she feels are important to learn about. In this case we call this a “guest curator”…!!!
Curating is actually the main work that we do, there is no other word for it. But maybe you hate museums — too boring? — so when you suggest an amazing tea, we will gladly have you as a “guest grump”
How do you find the leaf grade on this by and large?
Mine seems to have rather a lot of pretty fine chop and even dust, though it brews up clear.
Do you mean size or just the quality? If you mean quality, you’re right that this can be a bit inconsistent session to session. It’s certainly not a boutique production. I do find around 80% of the sessions with this are perfectly fine. The others sometimes do get a bit rough, esp. if I end up with a disproportionate amount of chop/dust.
Cheers,
-James
By “leaf grade” I mean the size of the leaf pieces. Like for example, the ’09 Yiwu you were looking at the other day is fairly fancy, as boutique teas often are. I didn’t try this one in a clay pot: the couple of tries at it I’ve done look so choppy I’d expect it to be a pot-clogger.
I’d say around mid-sized, maybe even a bit middle small. These aren’t huge leaves and you can definitely do a session with some chop. I think part of it depends where you’re peeling off from. I’d still say for most of my sessions (maybe 40% through a cake) pot clogging is a non-issue.
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