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 these recently. (more…)
Category: Article
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Drinking Log Reflections v1
Last December, I finally ran out of new samples. After that, I began drinking from my stash exclusively. Being an unabashed data nerd I decided to also record my own tea consumption. This is interesting because it is essentially a speed test and can be helpful and informative for my own buying. My uninterrupted drinking was halted in mid January when a whole sleuth of samples arrived creating the obvious caveat of a small data size. Nevertheless, here’s a quick look at the data. (more…)
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Simple Home Storage Solutions
Pu’erh storage is as complicated as you want to make it. But it’s also an issue that needs to be addressed for anyone with a stash. Keeping your pu’erh in open air or close to aromas is a good way to slowly ruin it. Pumidor is a scary sounding word and can represent overly elaborate, endlessly complex solutions.. For instance there are some pu-heads that have hand-built a sealed non-aromatic wood box from scratch with multiple humidifiers and hygrometers. Or installed a fishtank heater to emulate the humidity of more humid storage. This can all be a bit intimidating for someone just getting started with a cake or two. There’s also an appeal in keeping it simple. In many ways, the more complex the solution the more points of stress or concern. Maybe you’re just tipping your toes into the water and have a couple cakes or maybe you prefer a minimalist approach to tea. Either way, it is very possible to create simple, workable solution that don’t involve adding humidity or hygrometers. (more…)
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Baseball Closers, 99 Bottles of Wine (Drink Your Damn Tea & Buy the Good Shit)
In major league baseball a team’s best relief pitcher is nearly always their closer. For years, the closer has been only used under very specific criteria. (a) Their team is ahead by three runs or less (b) there is one inning left. As advanced statistics and improved game theory have seeped into the sport, some teams have realized that this is a mistake. For instance… Utilizing a team’s best pitcher sometime in the middle of the game can make a lot of sense if stakes are sufficiently high. This logic has slowly caught on amongst some analytical savvy managers, some traditionalists continue to prefer waiting for a “save situation” and have suffered the consequences. This infamously occurred in the 2016 playoffs when long-time manager Buck Showalter never put in the best relief pitcher of the year in a winner takes all game, waiting for a lead that never came. (more…)
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Five Things I Like and Don’t Like. Group Buys, Buying Off the Shelf, Old Trees, YS Wet Teas.
Things that have been occurring in the tea world that I like and dislike..
Group Buys
Group buys have been popping up with increasing frequency over the past 1.5 years. They can be a very good way to try teas, often very inexpensively. When there’s a markup it’s nearly always smaller than a vendor and you’ll usually get very fair value for your money. It’s also worth doing, because there’s a lot of learning that can happen when people are drinking and discussing the same teas. Here’s a couple public ones worth mentioning: (more…)
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Early Yunnan Sourcing Production Aging Mini-Report & Some Pu’erh Thoughts
Many of the original pu’erh productions by western-facing vendor were in the 2009 or 2010 and principally done by Essence of Tea and Yunnan Sourcing. A lot has changed since then, and while there’s the odd production that has stayed somewhat consistent (i.e. YS Wuliang) both vendors are making from very different gardens and areas now. All of the retastes are still available, and despite them being double (or more) of the price originally sold the pu’erh market has risen meaning most are still reasonably priced and attainable as mid-range, dry-stored tea. (more…)
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No Frills. 18 Quick Hits, Less Premium Young Tea Report
One of the perks (or drawbacks) of having a blog is literally drowning in tea/samples. I’m not really in the market for young tea, especially not cheaper young tea. This is mainly because I don’t drink these teas nearly often enough and the number of samples I cross path with are more than enough to satiate my sporadic young tea craving. As a result, I cranked through this batch of samples pretty quickly in a series of shortish sessions.. Here’s some quick impressions on thoughts on teas I’ve had recently that were priced beneath the Fomo Report on more premium teas (>$0.40/g). (more…)
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Tea Drinking Reflections 2016 & 15 Cake Challenge 2017
In what is becoming a yearly tradition, I spent too much and bought too much in 2016. An extended trip to Asia didn’t help matters. Unlike 2015 I’m actually pretty happy with what I spent money on. Part of this is just having another a year under my belt to both learn about tea and my own preferences. For instance, 85-90% of the pu’erh I bought comes from 2003-2007. This hits the right mark for me of affordability, quality of base material and storage. I’ve avoided buying young pu’erh, a category I tend to not drink much and have bought too much of in the past. I bought a bit less mature pu’erh than 2015, but that’s more because I’ve found it difficult to match some of the traditionally stored pu’erh I found in Hong Kong during my brief trip there in 2015. (more…)
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How Dry is Kunming Storage & What Does That Mean For Western Home Storage?
“At least it’s not Kunming storage.”
“Stored in Kunming….. Maybe it’ll be ready in 50 years.”
-Anonymous Pu’erh HeadsKunming has developed a reputation as the whipping boy of storage locations. Anyone who’s sampled a tea aged in Kunming knows it’s way different and tea is much slower to change than something like dry Hong Kong storage. There’s a sizable group of pu’erh people who consider Kunming a pu’erh purgatory where tea neither ages nor dries out.. So let’s avoid Kunming and store all our pu’erh in Guangdong or Malaysia. Not so fast.. Yunnan itself certainly isn’t a desert, with places that are known to have decently hot and humid environments, such as Menghai County or Jinghong. Kunming is even described in the climate section of wikipedia as having a “mild climate”. So how dry is Kunming storage really? (more…)
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Give me Guangdong or Give me Death. Factory Tea Report
Young pu and now factory tea. Aren’t you the guy that published that super-negative Xiaguan report. At least young pu’erh is popular in our western pu’erh community. Who the hell is talking about factory tea in the west? Other than the odd cake here or there, or a LP/Toby group buy most of our pu’erh drinkers are chugging White2Tea, Bitter Leaf, Yunnan Sourcing, Essence of Tea, Crimson Lotus, etc. Then we have another collection of drinkers buying up Yangqing Hao and Wistaria. Factory pu’erh is the neglected child, that is championed amongst some old school drinkers, a group of drinkers that isn’t really represented in the western pu-sphere. (more…)