TeaDB

Tag: White2Tea

  • Denny’s Raw Puerh Tea Aging Project + DIY Smart Pumador

    Denny’s Raw Puerh Tea Aging Project + DIY Smart Pumador

    [Live Document]Tea Den Aging Project Goals:

    • Accurate representation of variables influencing tea aging
    • Accurate visual representation of tea aging over time
    • Subjective perspective of tea aging over time

    Creating a “Smart” Pumador

    Materials & Tools:

      • HomeAssistant
      • Wifi Smart Socket
      • Zigbee Humidity & Temperature Sensor
      • Seedling Heating Mat
      • Boveda 69% Two-Way Humidity Control Pack, Size 320
      • Insulation
      • NodeMCU ESP32 SBC
      • SHTC3 Temperature and Humidity Sensor

    Version 1:

    I used a Zigbee-protocol humidity and temperature sensor to start (the square device in there).  While zigbee is great for household lights, zigbee devices work best in a tight mesh with amplifier or repeaters within the system.  As my pumador is far away from other zigbee devices, the quality of the signal was iffy at best, and the sensors in this device aren’t great.

    pumador v1

    Gotta build my own I guess.

    Version 2:

    I’m using a ESP32 board (NodeMCU 38 pinout) and a SHTC3 humidity and temperature sensor.  Way way better.

    Wrap it up in blankets:

    Here is the added logic beyond a standard ESPHome template for an ESP32 device, in case you want to build your own:

    • i2c:
      • sda: GPIO21
      • scl: GPIO22
      • scan: true
    • sensor:
      • – platform: shtcx
      • temperature:
        • name: “Pumador Temperature”
      • humidity:
        • name: “Pumador Humidity”
      • update_interval: 30s

    While it does require a wired power source (I mean I could run this off a portable battery but w/e), this device is way way way more accurate.

    I also moved my pumador into the room adjacent to our furnace to reduce the burden on the heating pad and save a bit of money.  The concern in this room is the ambient humidity is extremely low, but so far so good!

    Here’s how it looks inside my HomeAssistant UI:

    Wattage reading, effectively its power cycle visualized:

    DATA DATA DATA

    Humidity and temperature updates every hour directly from my pumedor to the interactive graph below.

    Publish It Online, Of Course

    Naturally I had to figure out a way to get it online.  I’m using HomeAssistant’s API, pulling data to a spreadsheet file via an hourly cron job, which I then run some simple python on to generate the above graph.  It also takes a screenshot and updates the featured image of this blog post hourly.

    The chart is embedded with an iframe on this page — I dare you to inspect this page’s code — so if you wanna use it yourself, here’s the URL: https://teadb.org/humidity_temperature_graph.html

    Also, weird.  We talked about this.

    Also also, the above URL gives you a fullscreen view of the data for even more pixels, if that’s your thing.  You’re still weird.

    Taking Photos: Color Accuracy Over Time

    Turns out, to do this right is hard.

    My 80/20 TLDR:

    • Taking photos at night
    • Same lighting setup
    • Take a lot of photos
    • Color match photos across time

    Materials & Tools

    • RawTherapee
    • Color Correction Card

    Lighting Setup

    White2Tea Hypnotrain

    TeaDB Episode #520: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBFJ9Hy2Nho

    URL: https://white2tea.com/products/2022-hypnotrain

    Photos taken on 1/28/25:

     

  • Young Sheng Variety Pack. The Western Tea Scene Has Loads of Young Sheng Options

    In my first couple years of drinking pu’erh I sampled heavily. Many vendors and many different teas. While I originally did not go into it with a goal of trying specifically young pu’erh, this ended up making a pretty strong majority of pu’erh that I sampled. This is due to a few factors. One is that there’s a predictable vendor drop with the harvest, sometime in late Spring/early summer or in mid-Autumn. This generates demand and buzz amongst the tea community. The second is that young pu’erh makes up the vast majority of raw pu’erh being sold to the west. If you put together a list of the five most popular western pu’erh-centric vendors and listed all of the teas they’ve released in the past year and randomly picked 10, you’d likely end up with ~8 or so being young pu’erh. You actually need to be pretty intentional about not picking young pu’erh if you want to try a different category of raw pu’erh..

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  • 2020 Tea Progress Report

    I’ve stored tea for around six years now in Seattle and while I’ve fussed a bit over a few small things, the methodology has been overall consistent. The pu’erh has been stored in an enclosed container with Boveda packs to ramp up the humidity to around 65RH. Airflow is low. Most people would call this a pumidor. Every year I look at my spreadsheet and decide on pulling a few teas to retry.

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  • 2017 W2T Happy Anniversary Baby Raw Pu’erh [Episode 352]

    This episode Denny and I drink a W2T production from 3 years ago. The tea is rumored to be an Yiwu and is decently punchy but with a good aftertaste and overall structure. Sent in by Atlas. Thank you!
    https://white2tea.com/

  • Marco Hotbox Experiment (Bosch) Comparison

    The most interesting storage experiment in the west is a heated cooler filled with mylar bags of pu’erh in Toronto. This is of course Marco’s hotbox experiment where cakes are conditioned to generate 63-69RH and then stored at fixed temperatures. I was lucky enough to get two five gram samples of tea from Marco that were stored in the box for two years. One was stored at both 23C (~73-74F) and the other at 32C (~89-90F) sent by Marco.

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  • 2017 White2Tea Sunday Special Ripe Pu’erh [Episode 348]

    This episode, Denny and I drink a thick, well-balanced ripe pu’erh from an old favorite. Thank you to shah8 for sending this tea in. I consumed this tea a couple years ago when it was released and it is interesting to see how it has evolved in the meantime.

    https://www.white2tea.com/

  • 2019 Pu’erh from Western Vendors are More Expensive Than Ever. Three Ways to Look at Price.

    I’ve been updating a spreadsheet on pu’erh prices on release for the past few years in order to get an idea of tea being offered to western consumers and any possible trends. The well-known popular narrative is that fresh pu’erh prices have gone up and this certainly seems true in the data. Last year the prices looked about the same as the previous year. And when and how much the price has gone up depends on how we look at this and there’s a handful of different ways to look at the data and options available (I do three here).

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  • 2018 W2T Censers White Tea [Episode 344]

    In this video, Denny and I drink a pressed white tea blend from White2Tea. The tea is still quite fresh but dynamic and quite complex. https://white2tea.com/

  • Aging Whites & Aged Whites. What I Learned From Char

    Recently, Char (Oolong Owl) joined me for an inbetweenisode to discuss aging and aged white tea. Aged whites have become a topic of increasing interest in the west, and while Denny and I have brought a few onto the show it has not been a principal area of interest for us. Here’s a few of the big points and takeaways I had from that conversation with her. I highly recommend checking out Oolong Owl’s blog and reading up on white teas. She’s written as extensively as any English-language blogger on different aged whites. I recommend watching the original video for those interested in this topic. This is my summation and interpretation of much of the material discussed in the video.

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  • Boutique Pu’erh. How Much of a Story Does the Top End of the Western Boutique Pu’erh Market Tell?

    If you follow what gets said about prices each year, you would end up with the impression that the average price of tea has gone up. But more specifically the price at the most sought after regions (say Lao Banzhang, Bingdao) have gone completely through the roof. A lot of this narrative is anecdotal. Tales of rich Chinese buying up all the top-end product from X area. Part of it can also be seen when someone in the Sinosphere posts the maocha prices per location. These lists come with all sorts of contextual caveats, but the trend seems real. I don’t see any red flags to really doubt this storyline, but I was curious if it’d show up by looking at some of the data of prices on production by western facing vendors.

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