This episode I bring on one of my favorite ripe teas of all time, an Atlanta-stored 2007 Dayi Secret Fragrance ripe. This tea is complex, textured and everything you’d want from a upper-end ripe pu’erh tea. Thank you Darius for sharing this tea with me again!
Rating: 8.2.
This episode, Denny and I drink a ripe pu’erh from the W2T club. Sample was generously given to us by Oolong Owl. Thank you!
This episode, Denny and I drink another fantastic tea from Cindy at WuyiOrigin. This time we drink her smoky Lapsang which is sweet, smoky, with an alluring depth. Thanks Cindy!
Stamp collecting in the pu’erh world means buying single cakes of a bunch of different teas. The appeal is obvious. A cake is a decent quantity of tea, especially for a single person, and you can chisel a little at a time to drink while it slowly ages. It’s also not a strategy I’m personally when put to its extreme and I try to avoid stamp collecting tendencies. I sometimes think of what I’ll be drinking in 10-15 years. Having a hundred single cakes where I’ve consumed 10-40 grams each feels daunting in a bad way.. It’s also quite easy to spend a lot of money with a little bit of this and a little bit of that and accumulate decades of pu’erh. (more…)
This episode, Denny and I drink one of the four famous Wuyi bushes, Baijiguan. This is perhaps the most unique of the four and usually processed towards the greener end. We discuss how it differs from your average Wuyi and fits into the Wuyi spectrum. Another solid tea from Old Ways Tea.
This episode, I drink a 1990s ripe pu’erh kindly given as a gift to me by Garrett. It’s smooth, ginsengy, and slightly wet. The off-brand label makes it quite affordable. Decent tea for an inexpensive price (was ~$35/250g).
Rating: 6.0
This episode, Denny and I drink a Taiwan Stored 2005 Chenyuan Hao Shanzhong Chuanqi from Teas We Like. I’ve had a wetter stored version (also TW Stored) previously and was not impressed. This tea is considerably more impressive with the more moderate storage allowing the high-quality tea material more room to shine. It is rich and deceptively potent. Thank you Marco for sending the sample!
https://teaswelike.com/product/2005-chenyuan-hao-shanzong-chuanqi/
More things i like & dislike.
Read here:
I am pro hotbox experiment. This 1.5 year long test will help to address how much of an impact heat has on the maturation of tea. Even if the jury is still out on how tea turns out in the long-term, there are a lot of interesting implications and takeaways in Marco’s experiment. (more…)
This is a non-tea drinking show where I test and explore the topic of pour time. Over the course of this episode I test the pour times of eight different vessels I use regularly to brew tea, ranging from small gaiwans to a large blue pot I use to do casual sessions of ripe in the morning. It is a nerdy episode, but in my opinion is quite informative for anyone that wants to think a little deeper about how they are brewing tea.
During these very basic tests I also explore how things with controllable pours like gaiwans and shiboridashi’s brew a little differently with tea than teapots. I conclude by examining the pre-pour steep time that occurs after you poured from your kettle. I specifically test how this time differs if you pour with the kettle from your left or right hand. The spreadsheet is a little complicated for this part, my apologies.
Super special TeaDB episode! The can’t miss event this spring is the r/tea Seattle Meetup. Don’t miss out on the only event of the year where you can see all of your favorite tea-related personalities.
Featuring Garrett, Meet, Denny and James.