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Tea Reports 2015 & 2016, Soliciting Feedback & Looking Forward
As many of you may have noticed the tea of the month reports haven’t exactly been on schedule. They’ve often gone longer than expected and I still have countless unfinished samples which I am trying to drink through. First things first.. I’ll be finishing the last two reports at the end of 2015, Taiwanese oolongs to age…
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How My Tastes Have Changed & Settled
One question I get asked is how my tastes have changed since getting into tea. I’ve consumed tea intentionally as a hobby for around 8 years now and while TeaDB serves as a nice document for looking and reflecting back it doesn’t necessarily track my own interests in tea with 100% accuracy.
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2020 Tea Progress Report
I’ve stored tea for around six years now in Seattle and while I’ve fussed a bit over a few small things, the methodology has been overall consistent. The pu’erh has been stored in an enclosed container with Boveda packs to ramp up the humidity to around 65RH. Airflow is low. Most people would call this…
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2019 Tea & TeaDB Reflections
2019 may be one of the more boring years from TeaDB to write about. I drank tea, bought a little, Denny and I continued our episode per week pace, and I wrote a bit. My habits are more settled, a steady trend at this point. I know what I like and tend to follow predictable…
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VORT & VOATO. Nerdy Tea Comparisons.
VORP/WAR In sports analytics (baseball and basketball), there’s a couple of new(ish) advanced metrics that have caught traction over the past decade. One is VORP, which stands for Value Over Replacement Player and measures a player’s contribution compared with what a theoretical placement player might. This is typically measured in baseball as runs with the…
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Sample Upwards! Why You Should Consider Trying Teas You Have No Intention in Buying
When I’m buying cakes of tea I tend to gravitate towards certain price ranges and have a mental ceiling of how much I’m willing to spend on tea. It’s not really based off of anything well reasoned or rationalized and I’ll occasionally break it, but more of an innate psychological barrier. This $/g line ends…
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Tea Progress Report – Washington State Stored Tea 2019
This is an extremely overdue tea drinking report. It was conceived for two reasons. (1) I recently reconfigured my storage into a larger setup. (2) I have a yearly tradition of picking some teas out of deep storage to retry and note their progression (or lack thereof). The latter allows me to get a better…
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Strong, Burly, and not too Expensive. Semi-Aged Xiaguan, MX-Tea Report [Feat. Garrett]
Sorry to all the people who like the drinking reports. 2017 has been sparse. This tasting is composed of a few teas that piqued my interest, affordable, semi-aged teas from Guangdong based Taobao Vendor MX-Tea. For this group of teas, I invited my local tea friend Garrett to join in. Garrett has a similar tea…
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Xizihao Report & Tasting Note Compilation
Xizi Hao is a boutique Taiwanese pu’erh brand. With Xizi Hao coming available from Taiwan, I’ve decided to release a few of my notes from my google spreadsheets of tea notes. Unlike other reports these teas were not sessioned in close succession of each other. Thank you to Emmett for sending me a few of…
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Yangqing Hao Profile & Interview
During my recent trip to Taiwan, I had the opportunity to visit Mr. Yang (Yangqing Hao, 楊慶號) and his family at their home base in Tainan, Taiwan. Yangqing Hao is a Taiwanese boutique producer of pu’erh tea, and is one of the earliest boutique producers to make its way to the west. Mr Yang’s teas have been generally well-received…