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 of which I enjoy drinking, and my behavior should reflect that. With these basic thoughts in mind, I’d say I’ve been partially successful thus far. There have been a few impulsive extra cake splits and purchases than I would’ve liked and the obsessive mind will search for endless ways to get around tea rules (cake splits, sample buys), but by and large I’ve bought a whole lot less tea this year. (more…)
Category: Article
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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 looked at 2014-2016.
It’s no secret that the pu’erh market has changed a lot. Old factories like Dayi and Xiaguan have remained mainstays, but are pretty different entities than they were 30 or 40 years ago. Boutiques and more recently westward facing vendors have popped up. Some have pressed long enough to fall into certain patterns for what they offer, i.e. vendor X sells tea as Wuliang every year. As we’ve examined in what western vendors put into their inventory, boutique western facing vendors don’t necessarily offer a balanced selection of pu’erh. So are these big Chinese vendors offering the same sort of tea as we see places like Yunnan Sourcing or White2Tea are? Not exactly. (more…)
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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, and we have access to a sleuth of options all over Yunnan. (more…)
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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 with how much I had accumulated (maybe I can just get rid of more sweaters to fit a few extra cakes?). This year has also been quite different from 2014-2016, with both my consumption and purchasing shifting significantly downwards, a shift I consider to be both positive and healthy.. (more…)
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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 write up some notes. We picked a handful of teas that looked interesting and added a couple teas I already own that fit into the category. (more…)
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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.. (more…)
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Strong, Burly, and not too Expensive. Semi-Aged Xiaguan, MX-Tea Report [Feat. Garrett]
Sorry to all the people who like the drinking reports. 2017 has been sparse. This tasting is composed of a few teas that piqued my interest, affordable, semi-aged teas from Guangdong based Taobao Vendor MX-Tea. For this group of teas, I invited my local tea friend Garrett to join in. Garrett has a similar tea diet to myself, principally drinking traditionally stored pu’erh, semi-aged pu’erh as well as the occasional aged oolong. I’ve ordered tea from MX Tea a few times over the past few years and enjoy their naturally stored (Guangdong) factory tea. (more…)
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Famous Tea: 1999 BGT Blue/Black Ticket
I’ve never really considered doing: one post, one tea reviews on TeaDB. It’s the most standard type of tea blog and I don’t think I have much to add beyond what many of the blogging warriors have done so already. I’m also not great at waxing poetic in tasting descriptions nor do I have the photography skills of some others. Nevertheless, I’m making an exception. For many of the nicer teas we’ve brought onto the show viewers have complained that we’re not doing the tea justice by chugging 7 or 8 brews in 15-20 minutes. And they’re 100% right! We’re not going to film 1.5 hour episodes and are drinking fast out of necessity so we can cover more than just 2 or 3 infusions of these teas. In short, it’s not how we’d drink the tea in any other circumstance.. (more…)
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Does Pu’erh Increase in Value? Part 2. Landmark Years & Dayi Special Productions: A Look at Price
To some extent all pu’erh moves together in the market. When the pu’erh bust hit in 2007, teas across the board were hit. Raw tea, ripe tea, Dayi, Changtai, Lao Banzhang, Yiwu.. Of course this is only part of the picture. In the bust’s case, not everything was hit equally and teas definitely didn’t all recover at the same rate.. Some teas rebounded in a year or two, far more quickly than others. Others slowly creeped back up in five or six years and some teas and brands have never recovered. (more…)
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Does Pu’erh Increase in Value? Part 1. Big Factory Pu’erh Recipes
When I investigated the teas that western vendors tend to sell (tldr: young raw pu’erh), the topic of pu’erhs value over time was brought up. In that post, I found that the average cost of a young raw pu’erh listed on western vendor’s sites tended to be less expensive than the semi-aged (7-15yrs+) or ripe teas that were listed. You shouldn’t read too much into this as it’s an imperfect comparison. The most obvious flaw is that the source material isn’t the same. There’s no quantitative way to measure the quality of the leaf, which makes the question of value over time tricky to answer. This article kicks off a series of posts looking at the pu’erh market. (more…)