How Dry I Am

Here is a truth to let sink in. Your entire puerh tea collection is 10 days to 3 weeks away from being entirely fermented and done. 

This is all the time it takes to break down the cell walls of our tea leaves, release the juices and convert the sugars with bacteria and fungi. This is what we call composting, by adding heat and humidity in sufficient proportion to begin to rot the tea just enough to break down the cellulose. 

Quick fermentation. The question is, why aren't you breaking up your collection and doing it? 

The question I am asking is of those folks who claim to be unhappy with their tea because their outdoors climate is too dry and to blame for their undrinkable tea. Because what they want is dark, inky, and basement tasting. I can understand people liking this profile as a daily drinker. What I don't get is why people will pay a lot of money to order warehoused tea from overseas, instead of composting their bitter tuos and resting a couple years into something drinkable for them. 

With the costs of tariffs and shipping overseas now, seems even more silly to contemplate ordering warehoused tea when you can get cheap beengcha from someplace like Yunnan Sourcing, break them up into a crock, and wet warehouse them yourself. 

Well, then it's shou. Firstly, there is no microbial difference between shou and a sheng of the same exact tea aged to the same point as the shou. We "assume" the sheng has more "nuances" but that may really depend on the leaves more than how they were fermented. They may in fact taste the same either way, especially if the base material isn't complicated to begin with. And that is indeed the case with factory tea, especially the bitter tuos nobody wants to drink unaged. They don't magically gain complexity they lacked young, no, we need more in the base material to begin with. 

The lover of quick warehoused tea is already giving up nuance just by warehousing, in favor of a mustiness covering it all. At this point, the "integrity" of the base material hardly matters because it was originally bitter, smoky or just one note, and priced under 10 cents a gram when new, for all those reasons. It is cheap plantation and you like it, except not when new. 

Nothing wrong with any of that, but why are you complaining about your storage while spending big bucks to import it already-warehoused? Why are you blaming the air outside your house when you can't bring yourself to get the fermentation done? Your "undrinkable" tea needs to be removed from the wrappers, broken up and fermented so you can have a drinkable (according to your taste) beverage instead of money spent on tea you are merely storing.

The main reason to "store" rather than ferment is because storage preserves what you already like about that tea from new. Makes perfect sense to keep those delicate fragrant notes rather than pounding them into oblivion with heat and humidity. 

But if your collection consists of teas that you don't like when they are new, teas that are too bitter or whatnot, why not just go ahead and ferment them? The only reason to keep these teas intact is because you plan to sell and they are worth more unwrapped. However, if your tea is primarily for you to drink, with no plan to sell, then no reason at all to keep the tea intact. Get your money's worth by drinking them.

I am just gonna say it. You must be in love with the wrapper. You are in love with the shape. You don't mind all the space in your house taken up by teas you can't or won't drink. You harbor nonsensical hopes that the tea will magically be wonderful someday, only to find your storage has done nothing to move them toward merely drinkable for you. For the warehoused tea lover, any raw tuo is a waste just sitting around in a dry wrapper. It will never be what you want to drink, unless you do to it what God intended for the large leaf varietal. 

Let's go further. I don't think any tea you are dry storing will be what you want, especially if you are ordering your actual drinkables from overseas. 

The upside is you can stop with the tea storage. You can stop complaining about your dry tea climate and apply the proper method to get your tea fermented and done. You now know the only reason it doesn't work for you is because YOU won't unwrap that tea, lose the wrapper, break up that compressed shape, and mist it down. You have to break up the tea because heat and water can't penetrate the iron compression. If this is too much for you, why not just sell it and continue ordering already-done tea from Hong Kong as you need to? 

Puerh fermentation takes mere days to complete. The tea needs to rest for about two years. Longer if you pull the tea early, and only want a half fermented. I have completely fermented tea twice. I personally like shou after 10 years, but it's quite drinkable after two years. Shou is so much easier to store, because I am STORING to preserve it. I can use less humidity and lower heat than when fermenting. My storage set-up then makes sense as more of a tea pantry.  

Think about it. All the tea you own is days from done, not years. If that is what you want.

A New Old Shou

Bonston BP-12 Automatic Brewer

Tailspin over the tariff rollercoaster to decide whether I really need anything. The true answer is always a hard no, but I normally get past my inner no without issue. Then I logged into Yunnan Sourcing US and my account says my last purchase was February 2020...

That can't be right. I know I bought that unnecessary Mojun Fucha brick, it was shipped from Texas because Scott imported a bunch of them. But I might have bought it on the dot com site, and it got shipped from Texas anyway. Have I really purchased NOTHING from Yunnan Sourcing US for 5 whole years?

No, no, no. I feel like I just woke up by looking at my account. The answer is my Son is drugging me. He put a mickey in something for the past 5 years, probably because he saw most of his inheritance turned into tea and thought, yeah enough of that. So I may be surfacing or the tariffs are screaming through all the drugs.

Sometimes a person needs stuff. I have to throw out the plastic Kamjove gravity steeper. Why I needed and used a plastic teapot when I have the best ceramics in the world, I will never know. Plus it had a black plastic top, black plastic which is recycled PC wires containing forever chemicals that turn progeny into two-prongfoot abominations, and then I proceeded to drink boiling water from the thing??? It HAS to go.

(to be fair, this is just my age-related dementia because the Kamjove says it has food-grade PC material.)

Luckily, Scott thought ahead to when I finally reach peak paranoia conclusions by stocking an all-glass gravity steeper. This is the Bonston BP-12 Automatic Brewer. What a beautiful piece it is, the lines evoke something-something-EU mid-century moderne, with the wood handle and lid. At $54 of course this is more costly than the plastic Kamjove TP-160 ($19.25 US), but you will easily save that discrepancy down the line by passing along less in the family tree. 

My session photo is brewing hong.

The wood lid contains a magnet, so the lid snaps onto the pot, the mate is the metal rod. After filling with water, just snapping the lid on will drain the liquid down. But then you turn the lid a little and lift the top off, this locks the steeper again for the next brew. The drainage is instantaneous. 

2009 Plum Blossom Shou cake

I added this little shou cake to my YS order, 2009 Plum Blossom Mini 100g because it's too cute, shaped like a mooncake. On the flip side of it is embossed the tea character. At $18.75 for 100g, this is a bit expensive for shou, somewhat justified by the purported age. I told myself that I can drink it up in 3 sessions in the Bonston because of the 200 ml brewing chamber and 800 ml total capacity. 

The tea opens with dusty shelf/closet note, confirming dry storage, because the tea has to sit some years to get this opening. It's the reason to drink shou old, you don't get slammed by funk, instead just an old tea cupboard and a bit of fruit. But sadly the tea is just pedestrian after the opening, some nice juiciness in steeps 4 and 5. Color-wise, the tea was just getting started at steep 8, but I could not coax out any more flavor. The fact that I broke up the tea completely, with no chunks to open more slowly and stretch out the session is one user factor, still it just tasted like water. Probably the best way to drink this is brew the entire thing in one go and drink it over a week so it opens real slow. It's not worth it, really.

Beautiful aged brown.

What this tea can be is a super cute mooncake gift you can give to a newbie puerh person. A gift of older puerh tea for $18.75? Yes and yes, and the tea is so basic shou, inoffensive to almost anyone new to puerh. Nothing off, not much funk, and yet nothing to explore for a seasoned drinker. A gift-er.

The magnetic lid snaps onto the metal rod
to drain the tea.

The Bonston brewer is a winner, and I tossed my Kamjove into the landfill to leech into the groundwater in the county next door for generations to come. Mea culpa.

Correspondence, Chen Sheng Hao

 8th May 2025

9 May 2025

We Are Screwed

Where is all the panic? Massive tariffs loom before us in buying tea direct from China. You'd think puerh heads in the US might take out a 3rd mortgage to buy up whatever last of the Lao Ban Zhang or the 2020 anything they can get their hands on, in shipping multiples of $800 orders or less to avoid the previous set of tariffs upon which the new 125% will apply. One expects the Yeeon aficionados to order extra boxes of basement dirt from Hong Kong to flavor their own stashes extra dank, all before slow-boat shipping is officially halted and before the private courier just isn't worth the expense, never mind the bother. Even though the latest memes give every indication of the dire need for the slimming effects of shou in the west.

I don't hear any complaining. Not seriously. 

Well, students always complain their tight budgets prohibit full indulgence of their puerh habit, but more on that in a minute while Old Cwyn sorts out this mess.

On the top end of tea, no one really cares. In fact, at the top end, tea buyers can think of the savings on tariffs as a beautiful justification to fly to Guangzhou and buy in person, or a lesser excuse like my ex getting a nice hotel in Huizhou while stalking an old girlfriend. Once in China, just courier everything back. Dirty tea tourism.

The top tier buyer probably doesn't sweat an extra $200 or $2000 tea premium and they got courier all along and first name basis with their tea pimps. If they don't like the tea, it's expensive compost. Although I am certain whole offices are dedicated to crunching numbers to see how much the buyer can tolerate on price increases or whether the blends will be sprinkled with a bit more Myanmar leaf than before which is probably cheaper although one hopes not. Or whether the warehouse in Canada is now a bad idea with double tariffs to consider. In any case, the actual buyer at the end of this chain worries about precisely none of this because they have multiple tea sources and multiple couriers ready to deliver. It's a business matter on the factory end to figure out how to sell to rich buyers.

Same deal for the mid tier junk tea buyers on Taobao. By now the lesser endowed but still fluid guys have at least 3 agents who no doubt quickly pivot to cover any customer situation with private courier, and to mark Gift and Happy Birthday Uncle all over the box. Is it really a problem?

I feel pretty sure Uncle John Kingteamall and Uncle Scott at Yunnan Sourcing will sort things out in western retail for our middle wallet tea basketeers. These guys are one fewer middleman cheaper than your other favorite curators. 

Buuttt, then again, don't most middle tea basketeers already have all the tea they really want? I don't see the panic here, instead I see these people trying to sell. Some perhaps overbought in the early throes of puerh enthusiasm. Others are holding tongs that well, they no longer like so much. Their palates changed, maybe. Did they get bored of the hobby? Annoyed with the storage issues...I have heard that often enough. Or do they view the incoming tariffs as a boon to make a "huge" profit selling tea at a good margin, but still far less than new + tariff? That is not completely outlandish. Remember when a certain online company (let's nickname as "Foggy Mountaintop") offered to buy back their tea when the price at the tea farm went up? Can't complain about a real opportunity for resale and trade. We still have threads on Steepster! 

Now we arrive at the budget buyer whose dusty little tuos just got more pricey, and aspirational tea even further out of reach. We are a little bit screwed, at least in retail,  and words like fu brick are not comforting. But in the after market, with middle buyers starting to sell off tea, we might find tea otherwise long sold-out. Or sample bags destined for the bin given a new life in tea trading. Eh, budget buyers might be surprised that the best market is more local, with stateside vendors selling stock on hand. At the very least, we can comfort ourselves that coffee drinkers have it far worse. At least tea is not scarce.

If wallets really do pinch out, what will happen to all that tea, especially if folks in Asia tighten their wallets too? I sorta see companies storing for 4 years, if they have to, to stave off any major price drops. Make premium product even more at a premium just to find. What was it Herodotus said, the money never stays in one place for very long. The taps will again flow. 

But now is a time of dribbles and drips. If a US Dad is sitting on a nice tea collection, this 4/20 day he may enjoy what he has, justified and ancient with fat knowledge of riches acquired long ago, in the "before times." Knowing that at least 50% of his neighbors don't give a shit. One less thing to worry about.