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Big Region. Small Region. Tree Age.
Pu’erh marketing is filled with noise that ranges from the mildly inaccurate to absurdist comedy. One of the most important lessons you learn early is to filter out out information that isn’t important. In the end most of us can come to an agreement that the most important thing is the tea quality, taste and…
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10 Non-Tea Items To Help You Get Started With Puerh – Guest Post w/Garrett
Garrett is a local tea friend of mine who I drink pu’erh with regularly for the past two years. He’s appeared in a few inbetweenisodes and you can follow him on Instagram at islikewater. Maybe you have tried a few samples of pu’erh, scoured the internet for articles on brewing techniques and want to brew…
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Xizihao Report & Tasting Note Compilation
Xizi Hao is a boutique Taiwanese pu’erh brand. With Xizi Hao coming available from Taiwan, I’ve decided to release a few of my notes from my google spreadsheets of tea notes. Unlike other reports these teas were not sessioned in close succession of each other. Thank you to Emmett for sending me a few of…
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Drinking Log Reflections v1
Last December, I finally ran out of new samples. After that, I began drinking from my stash exclusively. Being an unabashed data nerd I decided to also record my own tea consumption. This is interesting because it is essentially a speed test and can be helpful and informative for my own buying. My uninterrupted drinking was halted in mid January…
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Simple Home Storage Solutions
Pu’erh storage is as complicated as you want to make it. But it’s also an issue that needs to be addressed for anyone with a stash. Keeping your pu’erh in open air or close to aromas is a good way to slowly ruin it. Pumidor is a scary sounding word and can represent overly elaborate, endlessly…
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Baseball Closers, 99 Bottles of Wine (Drink Your Damn Tea & Buy the Good Shit)
In major league baseball a team’s best relief pitcher is nearly always their closer. For years, the closer has been only used under very specific criteria. (a) Their team is ahead by three runs or less (b) there is one inning left. As advanced statistics and improved game theory have seeped into the sport, some…
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Five Things I Like and Don’t Like. Group Buys, Buying Off the Shelf, Old Trees, YS Wet Teas.
Things that have been occurring in the tea world that I like and dislike.. Group Buys Group buys have been popping up with increasing frequency over the past 1.5 years. They can be a very good way to try teas, often very inexpensively. When there’s a markup it’s nearly always smaller than a vendor and…
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Early Yunnan Sourcing Production Aging Mini-Report & Some Pu’erh Thoughts
Many of the original pu’erh productions by western-facing vendor were in the 2009 or 2010 and principally done by Essence of Tea and Yunnan Sourcing. A lot has changed since then, and while there’s the odd production that has stayed somewhat consistent (i.e. YS Wuliang) both vendors are making from very different gardens and areas…
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No Frills. 18 Quick Hits, Less Premium Young Tea Report
One of the perks (or drawbacks) of having a blog is literally drowning in tea/samples. I’m not really in the market for young tea, especially not cheaper young tea. This is mainly because I don’t drink these teas nearly often enough and the number of samples I cross path with are more than enough to…
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Tea Drinking Reflections 2016 & 15 Cake Challenge 2017
In what is becoming a yearly tradition, I spent too much and bought too much in 2016. An extended trip to Asia didn’t help matters. Unlike 2015 I’m actually pretty happy with what I spent money on. Part of this is just having another a year under my belt to both learn about tea and my…