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.