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. (more…)
Category: Article
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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 that there’s a predictable vendor drop with the harvest, sometime in late Spring/early summer or in mid-Autumn. This generates demand and buzz amongst the tea community. The second is that young pu’erh makes up the vast majority of raw pu’erh being sold to the west. If you put together a list of the five most popular western pu’erh-centric vendors and listed all of the teas they’ve released in the past year and randomly picked 10, you’d likely end up with ~8 or so being young pu’erh. You actually need to be pretty intentional about not picking young pu’erh if you want to try a different category of raw pu’erh..
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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 environments are golf or classical music. Wicked environments are inherently trickier, noisier and typically involve situations where not all information is available. Conditions are dynamic and involve other people and judgement where feedback is not automatic. And when feedback is given it may be partial or inaccurate.
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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 a pumidor. Every year I look at my spreadsheet and decide on pulling a few teas to retry.
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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 a useful way to think about short-term storage and the condition a cake may be currently at.
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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 were stored in the box for two years. One was stored at both 23C (~73-74F) and the other at 32C (~89-90F) sent by Marco.
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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 patterns.
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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 prices looked about the same as the previous year. And when and how much the price has gone up depends on how we look at this and there’s a handful of different ways to look at the data and options available (I do three here).
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VORT & VOATO. Nerdy Tea Comparisons.
VORP/WAR
In sports analytics (baseball and basketball), there’s a couple of new(ish) advanced metrics that have caught traction over the past decade. One is VORP, which stands for Value Over Replacement Player and measures a player’s contribution compared with what a theoretical placement player might. This is typically measured in baseball as runs with the player being measured vs. a replacement player. Another somewhat similar metric, is WAR or Wins Above Replacement. This is measured in wins. The methodologies for these vary across sports, but involve aggregating data together in some sort of a model.
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Five Things I Like & Dislike. Short-Term Pumidors, B&B Sheng of the Day, Buying Pu’erh on Amazon
Five things I like & dislike.
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