A reboot of five things I like & dislike.

Prepackaged Tea Sizes

One form of this are tea balls. My opinion on tea balls have been documented. below Frankly, I’m surprised this form of compressed tea is common at all. But Glen (of Crimson Lotus) insists people like them, and I’d assume that they would’ve disappeared out of circulation if everyone felt the same as me. Still, I’d much prefer to have the same material in a regular sample form.

Why do I dislike this? I like to be able to use as much or as little. Having a half used pack of 8 gram tea is annoying. I can live with it for very nice teas (say high end Yancha), but when it comes to cheaper stuff it can be annoying.

I’m a bit more forgiving towards eastern vendors, like Cheung Hing Tea Shop, who will package up tea into paper servings. Still..l I’d prefer to have my tea in a larger amount where I can pull however much I want. I don’t have a standardized session size for most teas. Sometimes I brew in smaller vessels, other times larger and the amount of leaf is one of the important things to consider. Prepackaged tea sizes don’t make it impossible to customize your brew but it creates an additional burden and less flexibility.

Inexpensive Dayi

Who doesn’t like cheaper tea.. While boutique tea can certainly rise and fall, nothing quite rises and falls like big factory tea that is used by some as an investment. Dayi is especially subject to this dynamic due to their massive production capacity as well as being the most common target for investing in pu’erh. Due to various reasons, the price has fallen a lot. In particular interest for myself, 15 year old factory tea from ol’ big benefits is as cheap as it’s been in a while. Older Dayi hasn’t fallen quite as much, but it’s still a good time to buy all kinds of productions from Dayi for those interested. When adding and considering inflation, it makes the deal even sweeter.

Mattcha Still Posting

While I’ve kept light tabs on the tea scene during the last five years, it’s probably become a bit more of a secondary hobby. Recently, I’ve started getting a bit back on the train.. Shoutout to Matt, who is as active as ever. His blog is 16 years old!? That makes him the centenarian of pu’erh blogging. Impressive stuff. I thought I had a good run at 8 years.. He’s recently been on a run of young pu’erh. Also impressive in its own way.

Kudos to you Matt. Also a shoutout to Shah for keeping the 16 year old thread alive with his sheng of the day on Badger and Blade (I still don’t get why this is on a shaving forum).

Price Your Tea to Sell!

I’ll occasionally poke around places on the western secondary market to see what people are offering and have come to the opinion that many people are pricing their tea too high. I get people wanting to recoup cost, but you should avoid just prorating it from what the vendor sold you. Or even close to that. You should be offering a significantly better deal than the vendor. It is a separate thing if the tea is sold out, but you should give people a reason to buy it from a random person rather than the more well known store (especially if the cake is already open). I am not going to buy a cake that retails for $500 and has been consumed twice, for $470 + shipping.. Accept you’ll lose some money on the resale and price it to sell.

I personally think a cake that’s been opened and tried a handful of times should be priced at 75% at the absolute most. The more random or strange the offering, the bigger the discount. A bunch of random partly consumed samples should be way less than what you paid for it.. And if the tea doesn’t sell, knock it down 10% each week until someone bites. Do you want to sell your tea or not!? Don’t be precious about a few dollars and price your tea to sell!

Taiwanese Pu’erh Boutiques are Super Available!?

I am just long enough in the tea world to remember when HouDe was basically the sole source for Taiwanese boutique labels. They deserve credit for introducing the western world to a good chunk of the TW boutiques.. Then places like Origin Tea and Tea Pals began offering some productions. And of course Emmett with YQH. When I closed my eyes in 2020, Teas We Like had really started to sell a bunch and LP was offering some. And now in 2025 most of these vendors still sell them, and you can buy them all over the place including ones like Biyun Hao that were previously completely unknown out west. Not all of these brands or the vendor’s sellers were created equal but for someone who has maintained a steady interest in Yiwu teas, which Taiwanese vendors seem to bathe in, I welcome this change.