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…)
Category: Article
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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…)
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FOMO. 2016 Premium Young Tea Report
If you have been living in a cave with your pu’erh stash for the past 15 years and arejust reemerging to restock your stash, I have some news for you. You should’ve bought apple stock. And google. And loads of pu’erh. Young pu’erh is expensive now. There was a time not so long age when three figure young pu’erh was considered an outrage. Now it’s commonplace and very easy to spend over $100 for a tiny little 200g beeng that may not even be that good. (more…)
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Practical Brewing Nuances
There’s quite a bit to take into account when brewing. Most of us figure out how they work in our setup and fall into routines that eventually get filed away into muscle memory.. It can take being removed from our familiar home setups for us to really think and utilize improvisational gong-fu skills to bring the most out of a tea. Maybe, you’re used to serving one or two and are suddenly brewing for eight, or you don’t know exactly how much leaf you have or are using an unfamiliar pot. There’s an infinite number of important and less important factors to consider when brewing tea.. Knowing these factors and how they interact with the finished product are not only important for your own gong-fu but important when evaluating a tea, where you might not be brewing but are observing and drinking in order to make a purchasing decision. (more…)
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Wistaria Pu’erh Mini-Report [April/May 2016]
Wistaria (website) is an iconic, Taipei teahouse. The building itself is nearly 100 years old and lived through its share of history. As a teahouse, Wistaria and it’s proprietor (Zhou Yu) have played an important role in the development of modern chayi (tea art) and tea culture in Taiwan. For tea folks or people traveling to Taiwan looking for a tea experience, it’s usually one of the first places on the list. The tea menu is a mix of Taiwanese tea, older teas, green tea, pu’erh, etc. It’s also relatively English friendly with an English menu and a conversationally fluent staff. (more…)
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How Much is Your Vendor Marking Up Your Pu’erh?
No one wants to pay for unnecessary things, but even so very few of us know the actual cost of goods, or actual item cost that the vendor bought the tea for. We’re often left clueless about what their markup might be. There are inevitable costs of running a business that we as consumers don’t really think about. Certainly not often. Storefronts, sourcing, marketing, sample costs, a living wage. The money you pay for the tea will go towards not just your tea but as presumably some amount of profit for the vendor.. Are you paying for fancy boxes, marketing material, padding the vendors pockets or is your $$ going to the actual tea. Pu’erh has the advantage of being sold as a labeled cake, which makes it easier to cross-check prices against the Chinese market and help to determine if we are paying a fair and reasonable price. (more…)
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Mature Pu’erh Report [March 2016]
I drank through these teas in March of 2016.
The last mature report was about 16 months ago, but with my Taiwan trip approaching I figured it was about time to drink through my lingering pile of samples.. This report is a mix of teas I own, teas still available from western vendors, and other teas that have since sold out. After traveling through Taiwan and Hong Kong in October my feelings on the market have changed a bit as the limitations present in the mature pu’erh market out west (really a subsection of already a niche market) have become increasingly obvious.. (more…)
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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 and have been covered here in a couple reports (1, 2). Having made pu’erh in Yunnan since 2004, it was a pleasure to ask Mr. Yang about a number of topics, ranging from some of his earliest productions to to the ever-changing landscape in Yunnan. Big thank you to Emmett and Sandy for coordinating, Sandy for translating and the Yang family for organizing, facilitating and hosting me! (more…)