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Five More Things I Like & Dislike. Tea Meetups, Non-Tea Review Content, Aging White Tea, Exploring A Tea Category.
Five more things I like & dislike. Tea Meetups & Online Tea Meetups (Written before Covid19) I’ve become more aware of some different meetups happening. This is very good. Chinese tea in the west is too often a solo venture.
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An Attempt to Look atPu’eh Price Over Time. & A Look at 7542s Over ~20 Years
Recently, a new site called Sinensis Research posted an article titled Is Pu’er a Good Investment?. It’s an interesting project looking at the price per weight of tea being sold by a number of vendors. The goal is essentially an attempt to figure out if pu’erh goes up in price over time. A couple years…
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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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Young Sheng Variety Pack. The Western Tea Scene Has Loads of Young Sheng Options
In my first couple years of drinking pu’erh I sampled heavily. Many vendors and many different teas. While I originally did not go into it with a goal of trying specifically young pu’erh, this ended up making a pretty strong majority of pu’erh that I sampled. This is due to a few factors. One is…
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Storage is Wicked. Long & Short Feedback Loops. Innovation in Pu’erh Storage
David Epstein’s book Range makes the case for generalization in a world that has become increasingly specialized. One of the ways the book categorizes areas of interest are as wicked and kind environments. Kind environments are where information and feedback is very available, patterns repeat, and situations are more constrained. Examples of mostly kind learning…
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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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Five Things I Like & Dislike 12. Measuring Pu’erh Conditions, Steaming Iron Cakes, Anonymous Vendors
Five More Things I like & Dislike. Measuring Pu’erh Conditions (Relative Humidity Generated) One smart thing that I believe Marco was the first to do was measure the condition/relative humidity generated by cakes (see conditioning experiment). This isn’t difficult and only requires storing the tea for a few days with a mylar and hygrometer. It’s…
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Marco Hotbox Experiment (Bosch) Comparison
The most interesting storage experiment in the west is a heated cooler filled with mylar bags of pu’erh in Toronto. This is of course Marco’s hotbox experiment where cakes are conditioned to generate 63-69RH and then stored at fixed temperatures. I was lucky enough to get two five gram samples of tea from Marco that…
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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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2019 Pu’erh from Western Vendors are More Expensive Than Ever. Three Ways to Look at Price.
I’ve been updating a spreadsheet on pu’erh prices on release for the past few years in order to get an idea of tea being offered to western consumers and any possible trends. The well-known popular narrative is that fresh pu’erh prices have gone up and this certainly seems true in the data. Last year the…