Gushu Goes on Sale

In one of my earlier posts this year, I cleaned out my boxes of samples and got rid of a few teas I know I will never drink up. I kept a few of the samples to try out over the summer, and one of these is a 2017 Autumn Yangjiazhai, which I assume is from the Baoshan area of western Yunnan? This tea is sold by yiwumountainteas.com currently for 207 GBP/357g cake. I got the sample free a few years ago along with a couple of other teas that the site offered to some bloggers when getting started with their online store. This website sells decent teas for fairly high prices. I never really felt I got a good handle on their offerings in part because they sent samples of teas that are probably not the best ones. I'm not including links here because I don't need the vendor chasing down traffic to my blog after this post. I did review a tea from their samples in the past, you can check that out here.

YiwuMountainTeas is another example of a western husband with Chinese wife, and his father-in-law is a tea farmer in Gaoshan providing tea to this married couple to get started, rather like how MistyPeaks got started with a personal connection to a farmer. I notice that the more recent spring teas from Gaoshan are the teas that sell out on the website, and I suspect they are one of the best offerings they have. However, the Gaoshan tea was not included in the sample teas and so I haven't tried the father-in-law's tea. 

The company operates out of Guangzhou, but the couple closes down this location and goes to Yunnan in the spring to scout teas, including some they claim on their blog to acquire through introductions to other farmers via the father-in-law. They claim to offer these farmers prices well "above market" in order to guarantee the selling arrangement year after year and keep the farmers from selling their land blah-blah, but also to provide a better living for the area, paved roads etc. I asked another vendor how much above market price you'd have to pay for this kind of arrangement, and the vendor replied about 8-10x more than a large factory would pay a farmer. 

All this sounds well and good, except their prices are on the high side as mentioned. But all spring-long this year the website offered "sale prices" on the teas during the time they were in Yunnan scouting out 2021 tea. These sale prices are now mostly gone except on a few teas. But the sale prices this spring were very steep sale prices!

A screenshot I captured in late April

It's all good to say you pay the farmers more than factories would, and I believe that to be true, but how much is available for discount? I looked at these sale prices which approached nearly 50% markdown in some cases and wondered if they are showing their hand a bit too much. If they have room for this much markdown, one of two things must be true: either they have an incredibly steep markup 100% above what they are paying the farmers, or they fire-sale-d the tea below cost, possibly in order to raise quick money to fund their spring tea buying. 

The business just posted a blog update on the site titled "Why is Yiwu Tea so Expensive?" In this post along with the usual reasons Yiwu tea costs so much, they note that their business is primarily wholesale. That suggests a lower price is available for wholesale buyers, and presumably the website is more of a retail price. They also note that some of their "gushu" teas are not wholesale because of low quantity. Except that the website teas are almost all labeled gushu teas. Even the autumn ones. 

I suspect that most of the teas are actually tea gardens of various types, and not the trek-into-the-mountains-large-tree actual gushu teas, but whatever. I will just call them gushu because they do, and because who cares? At this point the rabbit holes are so deep and so long there is no way a casual buyer like myself, and probably you, can possibly sort out truth from fiction. 

The reality is that this seller is really no worse than any other at this point. I can ignore all the BS and just deal with the tea in front of me, which isn't Yiwu, but still costs 207 quid (more in my underperforming American dollars) and I wonder why I should pay this much money for a non-Yiwu tea and Autumn tea to boot, when I can pay that much for fairly decent Spring Yiwu tea from my choice of other vendors. We aren't at the point yet where decent spring Yiwu is so out of reach that autumn teas are the only affordable option. Though that may well change in coming years, who knows? 

It was getting dark out 
so I did brighten the image a bit.

Here we are in spring 2021. So, Father, how is this year different from other years? We are still at it with a lack of real transparency and really every vendor you look at has these issues yet. Whether it's outright rabbit hole, or a lack of clarity, we always have something of confusion when buying puerh tea and no possible way to remedy that confusion. Go ahead, message a vendor and see how far you get. 

At the same time, I kind of feel for vendors because they all have to advertise in some way, and what's different in 2021 is how truly distasteful puerh tea buying is this year. The usual vendor BS along with the price BS pressured onto factory teas sit alongside coming increases in shipping costs, and everything sits alongside job losses, funeral pyres and refrigerated trucks of dead people. Everybody who is lying or even just sardonic on Twitter comes across as distasteful. The puerh scene itself is distasteful with all the hazing and jockeying for positioning by people who feel ego-bruised if someone doesn't like their overstored factory tea. You can't even show off your proud purchases without someone nailing you for something. 

Just advertising your tea for sale comes across as blithely ignoring the ugly reality so much of the world is now in, even though we know commerce needs to continue or we are all screwed. Even my ex in Guangzhou writes "the pandemic seems so far away" outside China though he is lining up this week for an acid Covid test after a neighborhood Covid cluster was found. Normally I can channel my anti-social tea buying self into taking advantage of online confusion or negative chatter to scoop up what others deign to ignore, but the dead bodies and distasteful tea scene are too much even for distasteful me to chatter happily as I usually would. We also have rising meat prices and outright cat food shortages, gas is going up and so are my utilities. Wisconsin store cow butter is not softening at room temperature, suggesting possibly palm oil meal feeding, an outright consumer betrayal which absolutely sends me into a tizzy. Along with that horror I see prices of stuff going up that once up don't go back down. The US postal service is talking increases again and you know that once they go up, they don't go back down either. 

First steep after the rinse.

Maybe some people can shut out all the din and continue their happy tea buying. But what else can redeem the tea scene at this point? We do have the Enlightenment and Daoist people, though mostly puerh is free of a lot of this perspective unless you consider the Qi Hagiography picked-by-monks etc. But I suspect that many puerh peeps prefer a scientific view, one narrowed down to exclude even the health gurus proclaiming the blood pressure benefits of puerh. If that's the case, then all you're really left with is what the vendors tell you, or what the online tea scene tells you, and all of that kinda sucks right now.

The only thing left to possibly redeem the puerh people here is the aesthetic of a really extraordinary tea year. One that exceeds any of the past 7 years plus, just randomly putting that number out here because we haven't really had an extraordinary tea year in at least that long, despite what prices did last year. If the tea is truly amazing in quality this year it might rise above the funeral pyres, prices and all the BS. It would be worth the price to some extent. The only other possibility is a price fall I don't think is coming. I really don't think gushu goes on sale. Not without a whole lot of mess in it.

My sample of the 2017 Yangjiazhai still smells fresh even after a few years stored in the bag. I brewed 11g in 100-120 ml water and had to push the tea to get a cup that was never strongly bitter despite these parameters. The tea brews up a nice orange color which is more typical for an autumn tea, especially loosely pressed as this one is. I got a strong sweet brown sugar top note followed up by a boiled celery seed backdrop. The tea is a bit bitter on the back end, but nothing uncomfortable. Leaves are tight and I had to keep pushing to nearly a minute even on the early steeps. I quit after five. Not much qi to speak of, but I found the drink pleasant after dinner on a summer night, had a bit of a brandy feel, warm in the stomach and coats the tongue well. I wouldn't pay 207 quid for this mainly because I can get a decent spring tea for the same money. But if you want to try it, the tea is still available.

What can vendors do to get me to buy this year? I guess it's too much to ask to be more transparent, so instead try not to show your hand so much in how much markup you are charging. Remember that we buyers have factory tea price BS to deal with in addition to your BS. Make me feel better about buying a completely discretionary beverage rather than being so cryptic or up-front sales-man-ish. Right now I'm replenishing my shirt wardrobe buying shirts from bands and musicians out of work for so long due to the pandemic. Or even dead in some cases, as I picked up a few items from John Prine's site after he passed from Covid. I'm trying to keep local restaurants going by ordering out. I am forced to buy organic butter now. I'm trying not to waste food. So maybe consider donating some of the proceeds from tea sales to a "cause" I can feel happy to support along with a purchase.