Puerh Goes Nowhere

Road to Nowhere
white2tea

Over Thanksgiving weekend, I finally turned my wall calendar over from March to November. March was the start of coronavirus lockdown and the nightmarish 2020 that upended life for almost every society worldwide. Like many people, I developed symptoms that clearly indicate I am not myself. 

I found myself mentally focusing on silly matters, which means mostly everything unrelated to tea. For example, I worried about my surely imminent death from the virus, along with that of everyone else in my household including the cats. I'm not obsessed by toilet paper because I have plenty of tea wrappers to use in a pinch, but empty shelves in the grocery store proved almost as alarming as Chawangshop no longer shipping. I stewed over the greatest destruction of children's education in my lifetime, the complete meltdown of my state government and near civil war across the country, along with meat shortages and most alarming of all missing tea shipments. I thought I was mostly okay through rising body counts and idiot virus deniers, but tea shipments going missing gave me dry heaves. The world seemed surely over and I might have to go back to coffee. 

Then in November Houde posted some new teas for sale and I snapped out of it. After spending nothing on tea in over a year I dropped nearly $500 of government stimulus money I'd been saving for my county cremation. Once more I thrilled at the sight of Bulang Brick and indulged my Mengku madness. Leave it to Houde to inject a sense of hope I had been missing all year with the cheery muggy warmth of his Houston storage. 

Very quickly I got the feeling the world might go on after all. I took a look around and discovered Chawangshop is shipping again, and posting some new teas. Yunnan Sourcing is really stepping up its US store, adding a healthy stock of Dayi and beefing heicha offerings in the especially large brick sizes that are wholly impractical but supremely comforting to peruse. Locally, Macha Tea Company imported a supply of white2tea beengs. I can't completely take comfort in that because I know the tea hogs in Madison will likely buy everything up in short order, but at least I had my chance had I needed anything. 

Most of all, I note to myself what a rock of stability puerh tea is, a port in the storm, a safe haven of good feeling. Puerh tea goes nowhere, it sits undisturbed in storage until I and only I decide to move it. Unlike a world full of fast changing, life altering events, puerh tea stays mostly the same once you have a decent storage system. You can choose to turbo charge your tea by adding some heat if you wish, or wrap it up and tuck it away against any change at all. It's all up to you. Lacking any say over almost everything else in life, puerh tea represents the ultimate form of control. Puerh as a hobby brings the comfort in hard times that only hoarding can bring. 

Aren't you glad now that you made the sensible choice of investing in hard pressed tea disks? We have no worries of running out of tea like matcha people or hongcha people who must drink what they have in a year or essentially lose it to deterioration. I can hide in my house for years with a tea that just gets better and better with almost no effort on my part. On top of that my old slow tea might improve in value rather than tank like the stock market. 

Right now, puerh tea is going nowhere fast, neither in the east nor the west. Other than shipping, I for one think that's a rather good thing.