TeaDB

Category: Article

  • Stamp Collecting Experiences. Dangers of a Single Session Sample

    Stamp collecting in the pu’erh world means buying single cakes of a bunch of different teas. The appeal is obvious. A cake is a decent quantity of tea, especially for a single person, and you can chisel a little at a time to drink while it slowly ages. It’s also not a strategy I’m personally when put to its extreme and I try to avoid stamp collecting tendencies. I sometimes think of what I’ll be drinking in 10-15 years. Having a hundred single cakes where I’ve consumed 10-40 grams each feels daunting in a bad way.. It’s also quite easy to spend a lot of money with a little bit of this and a little bit of that and accumulate decades of pu’erh. (more…)

  • Five Things I Like & Dislike. Marco’s Hotbox, Flying Blind, Sharing Tea..

    More things i like & dislike.

    Marco’s Hotbox Experiment

    Read here:

    I am pro hotbox experiment. This 1.5 year long test will help to address how much of an impact heat has on the maturation of tea. Even if the jury is still out on how tea turns out in the long-term, there are a lot of interesting implications and takeaways in Marco’s experiment. (more…)

  • A Look at Prices From 2011-2018 Through Nine Yunnan Sourcing Productions

    In 2012, Yunnan Sourcing released a spring Wuliang tea that sold for $23/400g. Since then, Scott has pressed five more spring Wuliangs, most recently in 2018. This time it was priced at $43/400g, an effective price raise of 87%. This post is an investigation on how the release price of nine different tea productions by Yunnan Sourcing have shifted over the years. It is another data-centric way to look at price change over the years. It’s more simplistic than previous investigations but is intuitive and easy to understand. (more…)

  • Tea Progress Report – Washington State Stored Tea 2019

    This is an extremely overdue tea drinking report. It was conceived for two reasons. (1) I recently reconfigured my storage into a larger setup. (2) I have a yearly tradition of picking some teas out of deep storage to retry and note their progression (or lack thereof). The latter allows me to get a better feel for my storage and pick out anything going wrong with the teas. This year I picked eight teas from my own storage as well as a couple extras from tea friends, all of which have been stored for a significant chunk of their lifespan in Washington state. (more…)

  • How We Think About Storage.. The Storage Spectrum. Is Storing Pu’erh at a Constant 70RH in a Box OK?

    Pumidors are bad.
    Sealed storage is bad.
    No airflow is bad, you’re suffocating the tea.
    Too much airflow is bad, you’ll suck out the aroma.
    Your tea is drying out.
    Heated storage is bad.

    Other than a few select controversial posts, storage articles tend to be subject of vigorous debate and polarized opinions. In my humble opinion there is often too much spoken absolute certainty without leaving room for nuance. It’d be dumb to weight every possible storage setup equally, but I do think it’s good to be open to a wide band of possibilities working. Certainly when it comes to something as uncertain as storing tea in the various climates of the west. Once you get past the do’s and don’ts storage should be thought of more of a range. (more…)

  • Shop Like It’s 2012. One Way to Think About and Find Value.

    I got into tea in 2012. One of the first things I did was read everything I could in the western tea scene. This included old forum posts, new forum posts, blogs like Marshaln, Half-Dipper and the Chadao Blogspot. One constant I found was the constant bemoaning the ever-rising price of pu’erh, as long as there’s been dialogue about it on the internet. It didn’t matter if the post was written in 2008 or 2012… Since 2012, the situation hasn’t exactly improved. The most dramatic rises have been in maocha and current year productions. The majority of the highest-priced tea being peddled from popular online sources definitely isn’t old vintage tea, it’s something made in 2018 (OK, maybe 2017)!! Notably not everything has gone up equally. Things like YQH Qizhong, while never cheap in the first place have been fairly stable in price even since my initial foray into pu’erh. For the value-minded, this has made some of these semi-aged teas the target for people like myself. (more…)

  • Datapost: 2018 Pu’erh Prices are More of the Same

    About a year ago, I used the Way Back Machine/Archive.org to go back and examine the prices at conception of tea from western vendors since 2011. This was a valuable exercise and produced some interesting findings on a range of things, from price fluctuation, to the specific market each vendor aims for, etc. Crunching the numbers also statistically confirmed what many have long known. Fresh/young pu’erh prices have gone up in price by a whole lot in this decade.. I decided to update that  post with teas that were added since. I added 55 spring productions in total, 51 productions from 2018 and 4 from Chawangshop’s 2017 (they were slow to add them to their site in 2017). (more…)

  • Five More Things I Like & Dislike. Western Storage = Humid? YT Videos @ 1.5-2x Speed. Binghole Samples.

    Things I like & dislike. (more…)

  • 2018 Tea & TeaDB Reflections

    2018 has been a year where I’ve continued to settle into regular habits of drinking my own tea rather than a year of exploration. I still very much enjoy drinking tea and have it at least once daily but the hobby is more restrained than a few years back. I haven’t bought teaware in several years and I drink from the few categories of tea I enjoy and not much else. Call me a grump, but I got a good idea what I like and what I’ll drink. (more…)

  • Old Tea: 1967 Baozhong

    I picked up this tea from a vendor in Taiwan in 2017. Generally speaking, I lean skeptical of age and even moreso extreme claims of this extent. But I spent considerable time with this vendor and trust them more than most. Call me a chump, but I mainly believe it in this case. Finding tea this old is not common and I wanted to document the experience since I have not encountered many oolongs that I reliably consider this old and doubt I ever will.

    About this Tea

    This tea was picked in Pinglin which isn’t too far outside of Taipei and was one of the primary growing regions in Taiwan during that period. Like other teas, the processing of Baozhong has changed substantially over the years. I had the opportunity to try a (young) Baozhong produced in an older style when Origin Tea was still in business and it fit firmly into the category of a darker, roasted oolong. Today, the tea is typically processed very green and is usually considered one of the greenest oolongs on the market. (more…)