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Five Things I Like & Dislike, Prepackaged Tea Sizes, Inexpensive Dayi, Mattcha, etc.
A reboot of five things I like & dislike.
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Why I Stopped Writing & A Soft Reboot
In 2020 I stopped writing new posts. Even though the Case for Northern Tea was published at the end of 2020, I actually had pre-scheduled it in the summer, so it’s been over 4 years since I’ve written anything. Old School Pu’erh Categorizations was accidentally released at the end of 2024. The categorizations was a …
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Old School Pu’erh Categorizations: Yinji, Haoji & Ways to Break Them Down
There are a lot of ways to categorize pu’erh. On a very basic level there are raw and ripe. You can also categorize it by age, storage, area, etc.. One very old school way that I rarely but sometimes see mentioned is categorizing raw pu’erh by two very old eras of tea. The old and the…
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The Case for Northern Tea (North of Banna)
In the pu’erh world there’s three major prefectures in Yunnan that make pu’erh tea, Xishuangbanna, Simao (pu’erh), and Lincang. These do not necessarily get proportionate coverage. It’s hard to argue there’s not a heavy Xishuangbanna bias when it comes to the dialog in the pu’erh scene. I’d admit that TeaDB by extension of my own…
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Low Barrier Pu’erh Storage Solutions for Casual Pu’erh Drinkers
To the casuals, pumidors are intimidating.. They’re not something anyone really wants to jump into quickly. For seasoned pu’erh folk, one feature of using a pumidor to store tea is that it tends to scale fairly well if you can get the right size container for your stash. The maintenance and monitoring can be appealing..…
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Tea Reflections During a Global Pandemic
This has easily been the weirdest year I’ve been alive. Living in a global pandemic has not just shifted our regular routines and status quo, it has completely destroyed them. Denny and I worked from home before the pandemic and on any sort of ranking of people impacted by the pandemic, we would both rank…
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Why Shelf-Stored Pu’erh Storage in the West Is Usually Bad
(un)wise words: If you’re comfortable in your living environment, pu’erh will also age well in that environment. In the search for information on pu’erh storage you’ll sometimes come across folk-wisdom like this that makes longer term pu’erh storage seem awfully easy. Thankfully this sort of advice has become increasingly less common as we’ve learned more,…
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Five things I Like & Dislike COVID19 Edition…
Five things I like & dislike COVID19 Edition… Very Slow International Shipping The most obvious thing and a clear dislike. We now have all kinds of time at home for tea. But unfortunately international shipping, especially from China, has grinded to a halt. I ordered tea in March from China via EMS (typically 1 week)…
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The Gift of Skepticism. Why Having a Suspicious Outlook in the Online Tea World Can Be Beneficial
Occasionally I get asked what advice I’d give myself if I were starting over in tea. There’s a lot of things I could do. I’d undoubtedly point myself towards better sources and away from worst ones. I’d probably choose to travel sooner. One answer I might give to myself in this scenario is to tell…
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Hobby Crossover in Western Tea Culture
On instagram a few years ago, I was looking at a tea profile and immediately felt a sense of familiarity that dated back. After massaging my brain, I realized I knew them as an online personality from Blizzard RTS gaming that I used to play… An extraordinary random and tangential connection to something that really…