When I’m buying cakes of tea I tend to gravitate towards certain price ranges and have a mental ceiling of how much I’m willing to spend on tea. It’s not really based off of anything well reasoned or rationalized and I’ll occasionally break it, but more of an innate psychological barrier. This $/g line ends up being a pretty modest $0.25/g-$0.30/g. Occasionally I’ll spend up but if I look back at the purchases I’ve made in the past few years, the vast majority fall in this range or lower. This to me, seems like natural behavior and I think most folks will have impulses on what they’re willing to spend, especially once they’ve had a couple years of drinking and buying. People’s own price tendencies and intuitions undoubtedly vary person to person. Many have yet to convert to the $/g school so these decisions may manifest itself in $/cake numbers as well. For some, this could be $30 cakes or $100 cakes. For those who think in $/g, this may be $0.50/g or $0.10/g.
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Boutique Pu’erh. How Much of a Story Does the Top End of the Western Boutique Pu’erh Market Tell?
If you follow what gets said about prices each year, you would end up with the impression that the average price of tea has gone up. But more specifically the price at the most sought after regions (say Lao Banzhang, Bingdao) have gone completely through the roof. A lot of this narrative is anecdotal. Tales of rich Chinese buying up all the top-end product from X area. Part of it can also be seen when someone in the Sinosphere posts the maocha prices per location. These lists come with all sorts of contextual caveats, but the trend seems real. I don’t see any red flags to really doubt this storyline, but I was curious if it’d show up by looking at some of the data of prices on production by western facing vendors.
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Five Things I Like & Dislike. China as a Monolith, Tea Instagram, Small Vendors Selling Semi-Aged Pu’erh
Five more things I like & dislike.
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Why Simple Storage Solution are Often A Better Fit for the Western Hobbyist
If you stick around the western pu’erh scene long enough, you’ll hear about people setting up a variety of different storage setups. Unfortunately there is only a light track record for us to draw on. A handful of 10-15 year old western stored pu’erh has been lightly circulated but this isn’t exactly a quick feedback loop. While some folks flirt with fairly complex systems of storage, most people end up settling on something relatively simple. Why is that?
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A Few Considerations in a Group Session
I’ve had the opportunity to participate and host a number of group sessions since I got into tea. The context varies.. Some have been with a couple people unfamiliar with tea, others are with regular tea friends. This article on a couple approaches to choosing what to brew sequentially in a group setting and a few more of my thoughts that I thought I’d share.
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What I’ve Been Buying Recently (The Past Couple Years)
I get asked now and then what I’ve bought and where to buy from. Despite some past efforts of transparency and publicly shaming, I haven’t talked as directly about teas I’ve bought. If you read between the lines you can probably get some idea of what I go for. Over the last few years, I’ve slowed down an awful lot, first in terms of sampling and now in terms of buying. A few cakes I’ve bought in the last 8 or 9 months.
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When do Pu’erh Vendor’s Raise their Prices?
The common wisdom around pu’erh prices is that they rise over time. This is of course true if we zoom out far enough. If you were to take snapchats of most pu’erh production every few years, the trend would be quite obvious even with a downturn or two (i.e. 2007/2008). Not everything rises equally though. One interesting point of a consideration as a consumer is when and why vendors tend to adjust price. Thanks to Matt for the idea.
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The 70/70 Line & Projecting Pu’erh Storage
A few years ago I thought it’d be interesting to try mapping certain temperature and humidity conditions to approximate a certain area’s storage. For instance, if you could maintain conditions of 55-65F/65RH in a storage setup that might approximate somewhat close to average Kunming storage. 80-85F/65-70RH might be Kuala Lumpur. After banging my head and never really getting anywhere I decided that this was a doomed exercise (or at least beyond what I’m capable of). One reason why is that while location clearly matters in storage conditions, trying to translate outside weather conditions to actual storage conditions is not easy or straightforward. In the west people will sometimes get quite excited about storage and look at their climate data and try to extrapolate. I don’t think this is a totally useless exercise but it’s pretty difficult to know what to do with these numbers. This article explores some limitations but also what I think is a shortcut to approximating your natural conditions and how they stack up with places with an actual record of pu’erh storage.
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Five Things I Like and Dislike. Quick Judgements, Tea Chat Rooms, Condensed Descriptions.
Five more things I like & dislike…
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Three Menghai Tea Factory Teas Between 1997-2001
Thanks to Nug, I had the opportunity to sample a few older and thereby quite expensive Menghai TF teas. I no longer sample as often as I used to, and try to be focused on very interesting teas when I do. These teas were sold to us by Taizhong based vendor Wang JF who will sell samples of some of his more expensive teas. The teas were naturally stored in Taiwan, and while I do suspect there were some differences in the storage of these teas early on, I think they all fit easily into the TW-natural storage category.
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