I’ve written in the past about relative price comparisons and a couple different models of how we frame tea cost. Tea vs. coffee. Tea vs. wine, etc. How about inner-tea comparisons. Aged pu’erh frequently gets put up against younger tea, Taiwanese Oolong high-mountain tea, low-elevation, Yancha. One comparison I only occasionally see made is types of tea put up against one another. If you focus too heavily on specifics of raw pu’erh like 2015 $100/beeng gushu A vs. 2015 $120/beeng gushu B, it can be easy to miss the big picture. You may forget that according to your taste perhaps raw pu’erh as a whole is under or overvalued. Instead of asking if a $0.40/g ripe pu’erh is twice as good as $0.20/g ripe pu’erh, maybe you should ask if you’d rather have the $0.40/g ripe pu’erh or $0.40/g Taiwanese Gaoshan. This is a casual, fun little thought experiment that tries to make these comparisons. As expected, It’s impossible to make this comparison clean. Vendor markup varies one to one, but here’s what I would choose at these ranges! (more…)
Category: Tea Musings
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Evaluating & Purchasing Teas. A Few Things That Might Alter Your Perception.
You’ve just come back from an amazing experience at a tea shop at your local Chinatown. Not only did you strike up an engaging conversation with the tea shop owner but you got to drink through several different teas and eventually pick out your favorite of the bunch. Eager to recreate the experience, you dump $40-100 on a 150g bag of tea (not saying it was cheap). Except there’s one problem. You can’t make the tea taste the same. It’s not necessarily bad or worse, just different. You’ve tried using a lot of leaf, a little leaf, brewing for a long time, brewing for a short time, different water, lower temperature, higher temperature, yixing, no yixing, etc.. Other than adding cream & sugar (because you have a soul), you’ve pretty much tried everything. Disregarding the possibility of being duped (bait & switch) or other sorts of foul play, what’s going on here? (more…)
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![5+ Year Old “Menghai County” Raw Pu’erh [July 2015 Tea Drinking Report]](https://teadb.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/ripe-puerh3-940x198.jpg)
5+ Year Old “Menghai County” Raw Pu’erh [July 2015 Tea Drinking Report]
Shoutouts to Dignitea, Brian (double B), and Hster for providing teas for this month and allowing the content to be what it is!
By now you know the drill. I drink a bunch of teas following a certain theme. Blah, blah, blah. This month is Menghai County. One problem.. Menghai County is big and I have a ton of teas that qualify. So, like the Yiwu reports (1, 2) I’ve split this in two. So why am I doing 5+ year old Menghai County tea first? Simply, I’m more calibrated for these semi-aged teas because I more recently have been tasting through similarly aged “Yiwu” teas. (more…)
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“Yiwu” Raw Pu’erh [May 2015 Tea Drinking Report]
Big shoutouts to Carolyn, Richard, Dignitea and several vendors for providing teas and others like Shah8 for their recommendations! A brief disclaimer: This report should be taken as my own personal journey into tea and not as the ultimate, definitive anything.
WTF Part 1!? These reports have been getting progressively longer. Rather than do something sensible, (a) get an editor to reduce flab and misspellings or (b) allow my mom or girlfriend to chuck out samples/stage an intervention… I stuck my middle finger out and indulged.. That’s right! This report is even longer than the previous one and will be released in two installments. The first will cover the young tea and the second will consume the Yiwu with some age (somewhat arbitrary set as 8 years). (more…)
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Cutting Out the Middleman (And is it Worth It?)
As westerners we are in a land far from the production of our beloved Yunnanese pu’erh and from the huge tea markets of China. This seemingly locks us into a constant struggle to eliminate as many middlemen and meddling hands as possible between us and our teas. The western market for pu’erh is far smaller and physically further from the source, giving east Asian vendors little incentive to accommodate us. It’s no surprise that there is a western premium that most of us pay to get our teas. However, unlike oolong or green teas, pu’erh is also sold with very commonly label. For mass-marketed teas like Dayi or Xiaguan it is very easy to find the Chinese prices for the tea using Donghe or Taobao. It is also possible for the willing and resourceful to buy directly from the Chinese market (via Taobao). This article examines this and several of the different tea types and approximates the markups. (more…)