Bad Connection

Been three years now since the ex-husband moved to China and we got a divorce over Skype. That first year he lived in Hefei, so before he left I made sure he tried plenty of Anhui heicha just to prepare, but then he drank zero tea the entire time he lived there. To be fair, the smog got awfully bad that year in Hefei and he stayed indoors much of the time. The next year he moved to Shanghai where the tea scene is better, and I gave him some emails for tea people to meet for dinner and tea shopping. But then the Coronavirus arrived, and he again spent much of his time in his apartment . When things opened back up again he preferred to go to Disneyland rather than follow up on the tea leads I provided.  

Last fall he moved again, this time to guess where, Guangzhou in Guangdong Province. Yes, the home of Guangdong storage where puerh tea ages nicely whilst retaining its integrity. He doesn't have coronavirus restrictions to keep him home, and he is out and about daily in Guangzhou and could be spending his considerable free time scouting the tea scene. Now I am not entirely self-centered in my endeavors to provide him with connections of tea collectors and vendors to meet with. In fact, I have told him not to buy me any tea. 

The ex is constantly complaining about money, even though he has a pension, teaching pay and gets free housing from his employer. Tea could provide a lucrative side hustle. Especially because now we have so many people looking for cheap factory teas. Yet another vendor option in Guangzhou willing to slap on a shipping label to the west could make some nice cash. I am thinking in particular of his live-in girlfriend who is of course unemployed. I am uncertain if she speaks Cantonese but with all the free time she has I am certain she can learn. 

"Amy is busy, she is doing lots of painting of oil and pastels." He objects. 

Of course Amy is not her real name. I don't think he knows her real name. 

"Her style at the moment is like Modigliani. We plan to be like starving artists."

"So what will she do after you leave China in two years?" I wonder. 

Crickets. Bad connection. I message him that nobody has taken his 88 year old mother for a vaccine. More crickets.

Naturally it's a big fat nothing again when tea friends of mine offer to take him (and her) out for dim sum, and he doesn't bother to answer the invitation from them. Meanwhile the money situation is getting serious. He misses two car payments for the car he owns currently residing in my driveway, which I was forced to take for storage by the divorce judge. 

I send him a screenshot of the 2021 7542 sold by the competition. 

You read that right, $319 and change.

"Look at this, you find a few of these to sell, even a hundred bucks less and you're still making money. All you have to do is find anything Taetea, in any condition and we've got a market here. I can set you up with plenty of buyers." Even the hurricane/flood-destroyed tea must be cheap and people will surely think it tastes like Hong Kong stored.

"I've seen TV commercials for Taetea," he says. "They seem like a huge company."

"They’re like the Oscar Meyer of wieners." 

My ex used to live just across from the Oscar Meyer plant in Madison. 

Joshua Rainey Photography, Shutterstock

"Ew." 

Oscar Meyer occasionally leaked waste water into Lake Mendota and globs of meat fat rolled up on the beaches. 

"You don't have to drink the tea," I say. "I certainly wouldn't. The important part is the wrapper, people want the Chinese wrapper more than the tea in some cases."

I start to explain about the stickers and needing to buy a black light but his VPN disconnects.. 

Next I see on Facebook he spent money on a computerized sound board. "I'm starting a career in writing film music, I met a local actor in the movie business." He posts.

Another payment notice arrives in the mail for the car. I email reminding him about Taetea.

Just imagine yourself in this situation, you are a puerh head, right? Otherwise you would not be here reading this. Imagine you have someone in your life that you have known for more than thirty years who is now in Guangzhou. More than that, you have a child with this person. A grown child, even. Can you think of any better connection to the puerh world than this? He has an unemployed girlfriend who speaks the language. Well, one language anyway. Could be two if she applied herself. But of course they need money to start up considering expenses like: 

ex's expenses

Yes. Coffee. He goes out for coffee in Guangzhou. Probably like most everyone else. Are we seeing a pattern here? What are the chances he does anything related to tea?

"TaeTea is a company like Starbucks," I email. Starbucks is heavily invested in Yunnan. Look it up. 

"You said it's like Oscar Meyer wieners."

"Okay yes, nobody here who drinks factory tea eats Oscar Meyer. They probably eat Tofu Pups from Whole Foods, but for some reason huge factory is okay when it has a Chinese wrapper. Look I can't explain it, but do you guys want a decent side hustle or not? I'll put up the money to get started but not for the car."

He calls on Skype. 

"I don't know about the tea thing, but I could use the money. We are looking to book a house for the summer in Kunming."

Of course he is. 

Spring Cleaning a Puerh Collection

Management issues come up with a tea collection when one has so many teas that some level of organization and possibly curating down become necessary. Various reasons for organizing or reducing the collection can happen based on life events, or maybe just wanting to use the sofa. Incoming life events, such as moving house, getting married or having children sometimes result in needing to make space in one's life for these. One blogger not long ago got rid of almost his entire collection when he got married. That's a fairly drastic decision, most people probably are not getting rid of everything if they need to curate. 

I am at the point where the number of years I have left to drink tea are not enough time to age a new tong. I base this estimate on my worsening health conditions which are the same as my parents had, and I am approaching the age of my father when he passed. The pandemic year has added an additional sense of impending time, although I have received a first vaccine now. The jury is still out on how well the vaccines will do against virus variants and while I am not especially worried, it adds to the concerns I already have. So, I prefer to focus on my best teas along with a nice curation of drinkers for morning medication time when I need a mild tea. My evening tea time is now completely lost to bowel-harsh medicine, so that leaves early afternoon for enjoying a session of puerh tea. 

In any case, it's spring cleaning, every year just gets more important for me to do this, so now is the time for me to sort out my teas.

Keeping a Blogging Collection

Making an inventory spreadsheet of teas is a great idea but does not substitute for going through the collection to do a spring sort-through. It's curious that people seem to equate my blog posts with my entire tea collection. Even more interesting that tea bloggers will assume this when they don't show the contents of their collection. 

Like most general tea bloggers, I have focused the blog posts on teas that are either interesting to write about or people are planning to buy. No one emails asking "can you review the 7542 because i want to know if it is good so i can buy it." Insert the name/number of pretty much any factory tea. At this point, very good reviews exist on those types of teas and what more can be said? Doesn't mean I don't own a few, or more than a few. They just are not in my blogging stash.

More importantly, like most tea bloggers in general I prefer to focus my blog posts on teas that are easy for people to acquire. That's because as a reader nothing is more disappointing than reading about a good tea and it is not available to buy. I also have teas which are some of the finest I own, but they had a requirement that I not post anything on either a blog or social media, or else I am not going to get in on the tea. This is fairly common, I've heard from a number of collector people recently who said things like "if I get access to a really fine tea, I don't tell anyone." Bottom line, if a tea is sold out/impossible to acquire easily, I generally don't write about it. 

Many of my very fine teas are in maocha form
The haul is small. You have to take loose tea
sometimes to get the best, and stay quiet.

Many teas I wrote about over the years were of interest because at the time people wanted to buy before the tea sold out, and for budget reasons needed a tasting note from someone first, so I did it. It wasn't a big deal for me to pick up the tea or I got some blogger samples. I try to post before a tea sells out, but sometimes it does and I still might post anyway because a number of people bought the tea and we had fun reading everyone's notes. Someone in our group might post a steep-by-steep rundown on their blog, Steepster or IG, so I didn't do the exact same thing myself. Mainly I look for teas to wax on about for the sake of enjoyment, and many of these teas have been very good for my blog. A number of teas I don't own anymore, and that leads to the first category of teas to sort out. 

Teas to Sell

Might surprise some but I no longer have the first two teas I posted on this blog. I sold them to TeaDB fairly soon after those posts. In this case I was selling to someone I thought had been a tea friend. So even though the teas had sold out by that point, I came up with a figure that took into account the tea I took out but no profit of any kind. Every year after my spring clean I sell at least some teas to tea friends who are looking for something long sold out that I happen to have, and I can part with some or all of it. These are teas I bought with my own money, not teas I got for free. I am usually open to selling during the rest of the year if I see somebody in my tea circle looking for something. 

Another category of teas to potentially sell from a collection are teas that have wrapper value more than anything else. An extreme example of that is the 2011 Dayi Gold, which I sold and in this case took a profit. Such teas are a dilemma because their value lies in being untouched. Do I really open a tea like this just for a taste or just for a blog post? I usually decide nope. Right now we don't have a ceiling on where prices go for some wrapper teas, and I am at an age where I probably won't see the ceiling. So it comes down to a decision every year whether or not I will drink the teas or just babysit them. I don't like the image of the old person in complete denial who thinks he will live forever sitting on his riches, that life is not for me. Not when someone younger can enjoy watching prices for far more years than I have. Some tea collectors my age plan to open a shop but that life is not for me either. So, I have maybe only 6-12 of these wrapper-dilemma teas left and I will contact a few tea peeps to see who might want what I'm culling this year. 

Teas to Toss

I wonder if people find tossing more difficult than selling. Maybe, because people send me teas they really need to toss and can't do it. I still have a few of these sloshing around my collection and it's time to dig them out. I usually give some time to them to see if shipping sickness or temporary storage were issues. Really the main criteria here is whether I will drink them. If not, then why hang on to them?

Culled contents of one area of the stash

Some teas are actually perfectly fine, nothing wrong with them, but they are not great and I will not reach for them. I have to face facts and get rid of at least some of these every spring. One excuse I tell myself is I will experiment on them but I don't, will I let them sit another year?

Then I have experiments I am done with. Usually these teas have undergone conditions like molding and drying a number of times to see what happens. The tea might actually still be fine but realistically I won't reach for it to drink. 

Samples

Finally we have tea samples. Some of these need to be tossed because they are old or I know I won't drink them, or write about them because the teas are sold out. I have a hard time going through tea samples, it's the most boring task ever. 

More samples...

Teas to Donate

Except for last year in the pandemic, I usually donate some tea to a new tea drinker or maybe a student on a budget. Some of these teas are blogger freebies, some are just bits of things I thought were nice, and some of the better samples as well. 

Teas to Prioritize

This is really the goal of my spring clean. I sort out the teas that make me happy and are my best teas for drinking this year. They need to be within reach, not at the bottom of a pile that got turned over and over during the winter. Some I may break up into tins to get ready to drink. I also have teas that lacked storage and now I have room for them. Come summer I will put these teas out onto my three-season porch for some heat and humidity. 

Social Media Fu Zhuan Tastings

My 2012 CNNP Fu Zhuan kilo brick

Last month I received a packet of Fu brick samples from Oolong Owl who had completed a review of Moychay's Fu brick teas. Moychay is a Russian tea house who had sent her Fu Zhuan teas for review, and they sent not just samples but entire 800g bricks! So she reached out to a number of people via social media offering to send samples. She asked that I do some tea notes. The samples are well-timed for me because of my project to drink up my 2012 CNNP Fu Zhuan 1 kilo whopper brick this year. So I am very familiar now with that brick and can compare it to the samples. I consider my notes here to be addenda to Oolong Owl's post. I did not photograph my samples because her brick photos especially give a better idea of the product than my small samples. 

But first, an update on my CNNP brick. I have been drinking this in the a.m. since the first week of January, although I took a week to consume the samples from this social media sharing, and recently I have been drinking a bit of hongcha in the morning. You can see from the photo above that the brick now fits in my square tea tray rather than draping over the edge. So that is progress, but I still have quite a bit of tea left to go. When I break off chunks I get a lot of tea dust that cannot really be brewed so that is some loss which will mean going through the brick a bit faster. I admit that while I am chugging along fine on the brick, I feel a little bored drinking the same brick tea day after day. The CNNP is clean and pleasant, but Fu is a bit on the bland side compared to puerh tea. 

Moychay has several Anhua Fu Zhuan Teas, you can check out the bricks for yourself. The prices compare nicely with the Mojun Fu Zhuan bricks at Yunnan Sourcing. I brewed all my samples in my Teforia as I have been doing with the CNNP brick.

First I drank the 2017 sample, which comes from the 800g Anhua Fu Zhuan brick. This tea is very green with large leaves, and you can see from Owl's photo the number of thick sticks in the brick. I feel as though my CNNP brick has a better leaf quality with smaller leaves and fewer sticks. The sample is large enough for two different Teforia brewings, and I brewed each sample for two days for a total of six steepings per day, or twelve times two (24) for the full sample. The green flavor dominates the profile, like freshly cut weeds and green olive. After four days of drinking this tea, I really could not stand it anymore. It is just too green for me to enjoy. The tea has healthy golden flowers, and some warming qi but I could not get past the weedy profile. I really like my Fu teas more aged, and some tea factories age their Fu brick teas for a couple years before selling, so they are already a bit browned. 

After the 2017, I just could not bring myself to try the 2016 sample, although this one was Owl's favorite of the three Moychay samples. It is green like the 2017. So I moved on to the 2014 Shou Zhu brick. This tea has a browned appearance, with smaller leaves and fewer sticks than the 2016 and 2017. I did the same four days of 24 steepings total on the sample. This tea seems rather comparable to my 2012 CNNP brick with a nutty flavor and hints of fermented shou. I can't think of a reason to prefer either tea, except my CNNP brick at 1000g for $65 was a better value at the time when I purchased it. 

Owl included a few other samples in the package she mailed me, fortuitously one of them was the 2018 Fu Zhuan from Mojun purchased through Yunnan Sourcing. I am right out of Mojun Fu brick tea, having drunk all mine up since we met with the company at the 2017 World Tea Expo. Brilliant that she included a sample from Mojun along with the Moychay, because Mojun's Fu is still my benchmark for good Fu brick. Steeping up the Mojun sample, everything about it is a clear difference from all of the above teas. Mojun's Fu brick teas feature small leaves with the fewest sticks. The flavor is much more nutty and full bodied. Their teas are aged to a bit of brown before selling. The Mojun sample had the best qi and a sweating effect on me. 

Owl's package also included a couple of tea bags and instant powdered Fu teas. The T-85 teas are by Tea Garden, a company Owl met up with at the 2019 World Tea Expo, I believe. The teabag Fu did not contain enough tea for my Teforia steeping and came out rather weak and flavorless. The Premium Tian Jian, however, is a very nice tea. I did not realize it was not Fu tea at first because I did not look at the bag carefully, and the tea has so much flavor by comparison to Fu brick I was startled drinking it. The T-85 Tian Jian is similar to Zhu Xiang Ji bamboo-log Tian Jian teas that I notice are back in stock at Yunnan Sourcing US, also of Hunan-Anhua origin. 

Fu Zhuan is a pleasant tea on the body and probably beneficial for the digestion. It hits a bit of a wall, however, in that Fu just does not have the fine aroma and complex mouth experience that puerh tea has. However much that Fu Zhuan lacks in the flavor department, very often it can offer similar qi experiences as puerh tea for a lot less money than great qi costs in puerh. For these reasons Fu is worth considering as part of a tea diet, especially if you are not fond of shou puerh and want an alternative. 

I just do not think I have the storage set-up to handle a really green brick of Fu Zhuan, because I don't want to store it with my puerh tea. Even with my 2012, I did not use any special storage and so I cannot get the highly encrusted flowers on mine except in summer. In winter time, the drier air shrinks the flowers somewhat. Setting up storage for Fu brick just isn't worth the trouble for me and I prefer to purchase Fu tea already brown and then age it until it hits 7 years or so. The younger Moychay samples are just too unrealistically green for me to consider a purchase. 

The Mojun Fu tea tops them all including my 2012 CNNP. The leaf quality is good, the qi is great and flavor is nutty. Yunnan Sourcing just added a third Fu brick from Mojun to their offerings, I know the Yi Hao brick is good and at $51 for a half kilo, can't be beat. I hope Yunnan Sourcing is able to offer the Mojun brick teas via their US site at some point, because the shipping from China is pricey, but I cannot expect it this year with the freight issues affecting imports from China. If however, YS is able to offer them on the US site, I am sure they will sell out fast. Our encounter with Mojun Fucha representatives at the World Tea Fest has got around the tea community now, mainly because Oolong Owl has sent samples to so many people these past few years. 

My thanks to Oolong Owl for the samples! I will get around to trying the instant Fu teas one of these days. Or maybe I will save them for a sick day. 

You Deserve to Drink Better Puerh

72 Hours from white2tea
an excellent puerh if you picked it up

The whole endeavor of drinking puerh tea and building a collection is really about my best teas. My truly excellent teas define my collection, not the average drinkers or worse garbage I really need to toss out. I want to focus my collection on the best teas, because this is worth the time and money. In this blog post I am going to address the idea of fine drinking, because Chinese teas, let's face it, are the best in the world at reaching the sublime and puerh is really king of the pile. This blog post is addressed to the puerh snobs and tea whores and yes, the connoisseur. If you cannot handle that, please run along elsewhere, there is a group for you someplace else today. 

The truly fine puerh teas.

What is this level of connoisseur puerh tea drinking? More than anyone else, Mr. Max Falkowitz tried to bring the connoisseur puerh experience into the world of fine food and drink during his time at Saveur magazine. Max Falkowitz suggests that "flavor and aroma are only the beginning. Taste is fleeting. But the way the aftertaste manifests in your throat or down your gullet, how the tea makes you feel, where the qi activates--these are lasting hallmarks of quality for which connoisseurs pay dearly. Some of my favorite teas don't taste like much at all. The drama happens from the neck down." [I'll post a reference to Mr. Falkowitz's quote below rather than a link because the link brings up a PDF file] He's not done yet, he writes at least 2-3 published magazine articles a year on tea, mainly puerh. Barely anyone in the puerh tea community has heard of him and yet he was on the finalists for a James Beard award in 2019. I have a fortunate memory of taking tea with Mr. Falkowitz and I brought what I had at that time as my best tea. 

In many respects, his work has shown me that the western food world receives ideas of connoisseur-level puerh more readily than western puerh communities. No one wants to ask themselves: are my teas and drinking all about the best possible experience for my money? It causes pain, ego bruising and very often defensive posturing. But in honestly evaluating my collection, facts must be faced. If whatever I am drinking is not at the experience level described here, then I am in truth drinking downward in my collection. Any defensiveness on my part about this assessment can lead to closing myself off to trying better teas and having sublime tea sessions.

Frequently puerh discourse focuses on a practical mundane level of owning tea which gets turned into a non-drinking aesthetic experience. Tea reviews in blogs function at a mundane data level when describing the number of steeps, the provenance, the cost per gram as virtues. All this data certainly assists in the purchasing decision of a tea. But people think describing all ten steepings of a tea is an aesthetic end in itself, rather than the pleasure they experience, if any. So too are posts about the nuts and bolts of storage. Tea nerdism in the details, but aesthetic pleasure of fine puerh is in the bodily drinking experience. Did I really enjoy the tea or did I just get my caffeinated storage worth?

"Excuse me," Falkowitz writes in the same piece above. "No one tells you this when you start drinking Chinese teas, but the good ones make you burp. There's an idea in tea drinking called qi, which literally translates to 'breath' or 'energy flow,' and refers to the somatic effects that sometimes accompany a quality brew. It's a rare thing--the vast majority of teas aren't powerful enough to summon it--and a personal one, but the feelings are hard to ignore. Think sudden sweat on your palms. Tingling along the back of your neck. A wave of relaxation down your spine, like the relief of a well-placed acupuncture needle. The more tea you drink, the more qi squirrels its way around your body. Eventually, all that breath needs somewhere to go. So you burp."

Can we agree that an excellent puerh tea has the qualities of the finest aesthetic experience in the body, ranging from the aroma to the mouth to the gullet to the body sensations? It's worth the investment to find such teas, and to do so we need sources of conversation at this level. Instead, much day-to-day puerh discourse aspires to what we could consider "office tea drinking," which is satisfied by caffeinated barely drinkable puerh tea with garbage storage.

Vendor and blogger Wilson is fortunate to belong to a group of puerh enthusiasts who, in pre-Covid times, met at least once a year to drink and consider puerh tea at the highest level they can acquire. His latest blog post "short" illustrates the difference between office type drinking and a serious connoisseur session. For practical purposes, he describes brewing up to 5 cups of oolong or puerh at one time to take to his computer, so he does not need to get up for more tea while busy. When buying tea, he pragmatically brews up a thermos of a sample to sip on while running errands, pondering whether or not to buy that tea. 

But then he hints that his more serious sessions are quite apart from practical office drinking. "Readers will know me that I do not describe a tea by each and every infusion but rather by initial and ending thoughts. I enjoy the complications of a tea, the aging results of storage and pleasant sensations after finishing a tea session." He is sitting together with the tea rather than needing to record data on every steep. My experience of Wilson is that he talks equally about easily acquired satisfying teas as well as teas which are more rare and costly. He knows he has readers interested in both. He has sent me many a sample just because he thought I should try something. A couple of my most memorable teas are purchased from his collection. 

The best tea is gonna cost.

Good tea is certainly subjective and aesthetic and I will own my opinion as a personal one if it makes you feel content, or maybe less mad about the things I write. But really, you deserve to drink better tea, not just cheap tea. When I consider what excellent tea costs, it's not cheap. It's more like $200 and up per piece. By "piece" I mean the unit such as a beeng of any size for consensus-level fine puerh.

At a connoisseur level of tea, apart from sampling we are not talking about buying grams, or price per gram. Anyone buying in grams has a financial limitation and is probably drinking downward rather than drinking better. That's just the truth of it. In wine we have plenty of popular discourses directed at finding the $9.99 bottle of wine that tastes like a $50 bottle of wine, but no one seriously considers either of those prices as representative of a connoisseur level of wine drinking. It's the dinner-beverage level of wine drinking. 

Any time I'm drinking tea that costs me less than $200 a piece today, I am drinking downward in my puerh collection, not up. I am doing office drinking or I am accepting storage that ruined a tea. It is true that not every tea costing $200 a piece and up is a worthy connoisseur tea--we do have cultural preferences and collecting quirks and outright scams to sort through. But I can guarantee you that a piece of puerh tea costing less than $200 today is not going to be an aspiration tea. It's downward drinking every time. It's settling for average ordinary tea or worse. 

The very fine level of puerh tea is simply quite costly today, and the best pieces may be out of reach of many of us. Nevertheless I can still buy tea at a fairly top level of quality if I save the money, and am ready when the real opportunities of buying aspiration teas arrive. Keep in mind I have spent salary money, inheritance money, investment money and retirement money on puerh tea. And at my age, food becomes less important a pursuit. It's very possible to make friends who share tea with you if your taste is truly refined, or start your own blog. The money is a real gateway but the opportunity after that is fairly equal if you cultivate sources, which you really should be doing in any connoisseur hobby. If you do not know people, at least start there. 

Cheap tea is not top quality tea.

Office tea drinking and its discourse is not really aesthetic so much as a kind of puritan moralizing. This moralizing celebrates paying as little as possible for a piece of puerh tea and tries to extol some good traits about it because you paid so little. It's not an aesthetic aspiration but a financial limitation and trying to feel better about it. Or trying to feel better about the office, but the office is not about drinking great tea. The office is about a virtue of getting work done and not really your tea. It extols productivity and thrift, and opposes sloth and waste. This is the opposite of the connoisseur and aesthete. 

Drinking downward and not upward in my collection is also the case when I cannot afford aged teas and instead try to pretend hotter or wetter fast storage is my version of "aged." We have a level of tea discourse which tries to pretend office tea prices can acquire old or fine tea, such as on Taobao, and this is simply a falsehood despite the desperation to believe it. There is a reason many teas are so cheap and it's because the aesthetic quality is poor, the body experience is non-existent and it is base drinking at best. 

I can accept a time and place for such drinking, but it is not an aspiration nor a connoisseur level of tea drinking. If my stomach really requires such teas, I suggest that drinking downward is the cause of the distress, and drinking better quality tea is a level where the tea is comforting rather than distressing. If you don't believe that, I will suggest you have never really consumed the fine level of puerh tea, the finest that it is capable of. In other words, you deserve better than that shit tea. 

I can think of a few other reasons why a person might want to aspire to better puerh tea experiences.

Really fine puerh tea is still possible to buy.

The environment in Yunnan is not completely wrecked yet by global warming, or chemicals or farming practices, any and all things that could someday result in a massive loss of tea. China is also still open to the idea of selling puerh tea to people outside of Yunnan. Sure, we have levels of puerh tea accessible only to a few insiders, but we still can buy some excellent puerh teas even from our remote spots on earth. If the post will deliver, we can still get our hands on some good stuff if you have the money to do so. We also have more collector sellers. But we cannot take for granted the tea available now will be so in five years time. The market is changing fast and prices keep on going up. If you think I am pessimistic, others are far more blunt in saying the boat to great tea is sailed and gone, if you want to look around for more opinions.

The puerh hobby is a bother.

Why bother with puerh tea if I am not going for the best I can get? Puerh tea is a pain in the ass to research, buy and store. I am not in a hobby where I put bottles on a rack, leave them to sit and dust them off someday. I either have to pay someone to store the tea, or pay extra for the existing storage as a reality. Any type of storage ranging from a constructed tea vault to shelf storage requires work on my part to check the tea. I give my tea all sorts of mothering for more years than a child takes to raise. 

Given that, why waste my time with all the effort involved just for office quality tea? I can buy a tong of office tea from any factory or vendor or another collector when I need something to drink, and buy the next one when I run out. I personally cannot be arsed to spend my little bit of time remaining on anything less than the best I can get. It's too much trouble. I might as well just buy some hongcha or shou or gunpowder tea, something that doesn't require the elaborate care and storage that raw puerh does.

The storage is not really a worry for the best tea.

We are probably going to drink our best puerh teas well before they hit 20 years. How many of you out there, right now, are drinking tea older than 20? Anyone? You cannot buy genuine 90s teas easily anymore, if at all, so if you are drinking tea that old then you stored it yourself. But I am guessing that all of you drinking "aged" tea are actually drinking somewhere in 10-20 years, and the tea is still greenish, and your finest teas have a bunch of bite marks in them because you've been dipping in all along. In a way the pressure of storage is actually off of us because truly good leaf, kept at least decently well, retains its good qualities. Hard core storage is more of a worry for people collecting wrappers to sell, or on trying to heat mostly mediocre tea to turn it drinkable, and for that the tea needs storage strategies.

The best tea leads to the highest level of aesthetic appreciation. 

Does my tea inspire me on a poetic and gastronomic level? Anyone who thinks tea writing is flowery crap is drinking office tea. Or moralizing on why paying so little for tea is a virtue. Or trying to dump bad tea. I have bad teas in my collection too. But I also have excellent ones that define my collection. The best tea is physically memorable and truly will make a person sing or babble like a baby or strike one dumb in silence. This is the level of tea we truly deserve. I hope you can go where that tea is. I know the best is what I need to drink before my time runs out.

Reference

Falkowitz, Max, "What Drinking Tea Taught Me about Drinking Everything Else," Imbibe Magazine, imbibemagazine.com, Nov/Dec 2018, p. 94.