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..
(more…)Tag: White2Tea
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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!
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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.
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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/
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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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Aging White Teas & Aged Whites w/Char (Oolong Owl) [Inbetweenisode 211]
In this episode, I have a conversation with Char, best known for her popular blog Oolong Owl. This is a longer video and we cover quite a range of material. We begin by talking about the the different types of white tea and their aging trajectories, where the aged white tea has been aged thus far, and finishing by discussing a few of the different school of thoughts on aging white tea and how a hobbyist might decide to do it.