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Grams Consumed: Grams Bought. A Relatively Simple Ratio to See If You’re Buying Too Much Pu’erh
Cakes upon cakes. Filling up fridges by the tong.. Filling up apartments by the fridge. We’ve all seen that instagram. Some may buy a pair of cakes, one for aging and one for drinking.. There’s also the stamp collector who owns 250 different cakes including the entire 2015+2016+2017 White2Tea & Crimson Lotus Tea line. The tong…
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Five More Things I like & Dislike. Pu’erh Vendors on YT, Seattle, Gambling on Dayi..
Things that have been occurring in the tea world that I like and dislike..
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Outdoor & Indoor Pu’erh Storage in the West. Why Climate Data Only Tells a Partial Picture for Home Storage.
A while back I crunched the numbers for climates in some eastern and western cities and compared them to Kunming. One of the takeaways from that article is that despite its reputation, Kunming’s humidity is not that much lower than places with a more humid reputation, i.e. Hong Kong or Taipei. The more significant difference…
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Famous Tea: 1988 Qing Bing
The 1988 Qing Bing is a very famous cakes from the 1980s and early 1990s. Like the 1999 BGT I thought I would share my experiences with it. Phyll Sheng lays out the criteria for 1988 QB in this informative post. They are Menghai Factory-produced 7542 tea cakes from 1989-1992, and They are dry-and-naturally stored. A sample…
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Settling Down into Tea & Other Reflections
The past year I had a couple goals. The first was to cut down on tea purchases and the second was to settle into more normal purchasing and consumption tea habits. These were motivated by life circumstances and a desire to be more balanced with my tea habits. I already own a lot of tea, much…
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Western Brands are Very Different from Big Factory Tea
The data from this original post was originally taken from puer.cn, and isn’t totally complete (it’s probably missing some productions). The information is intended as a proxy to look at some trends. Here’s the dataset of White2Tea, Yunnan Sourcing, Dayi, and Xiaguan. Dayi and Xiaguan we looked at 2004-2006 and 2014-2016. For W2T/YS we just…
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You Can Buy Young Pu’erh From All Over Yunnan
The custom private label pu’erh has really thrived in the western market – with vendors increasingly sourcing their own pressings directly from Yunnan. This was a new thing for westerners back in 2009 when just Yunnan Sourcing and Essence of Tea pressed tea. Now it is almost a rite of passage for a pu’erh-centric vendor,…
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Tea Drinking Reflections 2017
2017 has been a transitory year for me with a few significant life changes. Part of this involved the very painful process of packing up all my tea-related things and moving from my apartment of five years. This is the first time since my tea-obsession began that I’ve moved. It also forced me to reckon…
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Don’t Call it Wet! YS Guangdong and Banna Stored Tastings
Yunnan Sourcing has quietly added quite a selection of semi-aged pu’erh stored in more humid conditions, not a bad feat for a vendor mainly known for Kunming dry-stored tea and the YS label. Getting the sample itch, I convinced my local tea friend Garrett (also featured in the MX report) to split a few samples and…
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Five Things I Like & Dislike, Obsession with Value, Tea Shaming…
Things that have been occurring in the tea world that I like and dislike..