Five more Things I like & dislike.

16 Gram Experiences/Samples

I don’t know who came up with this. Maybe LP? It’s a pretty random size. Why not 15? Or 10? But you know what. I like it. Getting locked into 25 grams is overkill, and 10 grams can often be not enough. 16 grams is enough for three smaller sessions or two medium ones. If you’re a 5 gram-brewer, it gives you a little extra buffer in case you lose some leaf here or there.

Tea Businesses as Side Hustles

This is a like and a dislike. One thing I didn’t fully grasp in my return to blogging was how big and influential TWL has gotten. The niche western pu’erh scene has been heavily shaped in their image and the teas they source. Yunnan Sourcing and White2Tea are no longer the only options to start out on pu’erh tea. What I really didn’t expect was that so many people would end up sourcing similar and in some cases the same teas. The imitators are no doubt annoying to TWL, but for consumers they offer more options and places to get samples and teas that are otherwise sold out. The TWL level of curation is something that these vendors have a hard time replicating however.

The downside is that this creates negative incentives towards sourcing more original material as it is now much easier to undercut the vendor doing the curation. These undercutting operations may be trading immediate gains (lower prices) for worst access and prices down the line.

Marshaln’s Hong Kong Tea Travel List

Next time someone asks me for Hong Kong recommendations I will just send them to this fantastic list by none other than Marshaln. It has pretty much every HK shop I was aware of, plus extras. If I find myself back in HK, I’d probably just go straight down this list. I’d previously used this list from Nicolas Tang but I think this easily beats it.

Different Tea Sub Cultures & The Tea Discord Ecosystem

A lot of the interesting tea chatter happens in Tea Discords these days. If I’m honest, I only half paid attention to CommuniTea (one of the larger Discords) from 2019 until more recently. Since then, I’ve joined some of the smaller ones as well as The Tea Table (the other large Discord, started by LP). Despite being smaller on paper, The Tea Table has quite a bit more chatter going on and has also taken on a pretty different culture than CT (CommuniTea).

If you’re just starting out, depending on which discord you join you’d likely end up with similar but different samples and vendors recommended to you. I think this is mostly healthy as people can choose which one resonates more with them. When something is also more or less unanimously liked or disliked by both, that also says something.

TeaDB as Documentation & Rediscovering Teas

In what should be unsurprising, I have archivist tendencies and am temperamentally inclined to record and document. Most recently, I put every pu’erh we’ve drank on the show into a google sheet. This took a bit of time as we’ve been doing the show for over 10 years. (It also now needs to be updated again.)

In drinking more tea and rediscovering some of them, I’ve been pretty happy with the past documentation we’ve done on teas in the form of the recorded show as well as some of the tea reports. Rather than judging sheerly against memory, having stuff written down and recorded makes it much easier to jog my memory and recall. There were some teas I thought I liked but had more mixed feelings on as well as vice versa. If you’re in it for the long haul having some sort of system to log thoughts is highly recommended. Personally, I’d opt for something relatively simple that doesn’t ever become too much of a chore.