North American Puerh Buyers

 

Recently Lew Perin sent me some photos of a beeng date stamped 2004 pressed through the efforts of one of our earliest North American puerh bloggers, Mike Petro. The "Just Puer" logo and simple-style wrapper were designed by Mike, and he arranged for the pressing and wrapper printing with a factory in China. An order for custom tea was placed and the communication with the factory required using "an early translation software." This relatively early effort to order factory tea from China reveals to me how little has changed with puerh buying for people in North America. Nearly twenty years later, people interested in buying new and recent factory teas from China are still working channels and translation software. Yet puerh tea consumption and buying has exploded since then. 

While outlets for buying proprietary fresh teas from online boutiques grew tremendously during this same time, markets for people interested in factory teas are still mostly inaccessible and at best inconvenient. With just about everything available online these days, including products from China, I am amazed at the poor access to Chinese factory puerh teas with the size and monetary power of North American puerh buyers. Chinese factories express interest in accessing North America as a market, but perhaps not in a way that currently matches the interests of buyers.

How Many Buyers?

The pandemic, if anything, increased the number of people trying puerh tea at home and looking to buy. Once down the rabbit hole, puerh buyers are additive, no one really goes away. A significant route into puerh tea for the North American buyer is through green tea consumption. Green tea has permeated everywhere in North America. Even where I live, in the middle of nowhere, my very basic grocery store for some reason carries at least a dozen fresh kombucha teas. People are drinking green teas of all sorts and raw sheng puerh is an easy jump to make from green tea. 

This is an important characteristic of North American puerh buyers coming from green teas. The leap from green teas to raw sheng puerh tea is much easier for the cultural palate than it is to go from green or red teas to shou puerh. The path to shou puerh is often through aged sheng. This factor is important to note when looking at the mismatch of puerh marketing further.

But how many of us are out here? The horde of North American buyers is large enough at this point that I struggle for a comparison. I am reminded of the size of specialty cannabis strain buyers back in the 1990s before cannabis became legal. We always had cannabis users in the same way we always have tea drinkers, but a subset of these had an interest in gourmet hybrid strains, hydroponic growing and efforts to develop legal markets. In other words, people no longer buying ditch weed bought gourmet strains of cannabis basically underground for a couple of decades before states made this market legal. Nowadays of course this market is mainstream. I would say that puerh buyers are at least the size of the early days of hybrid cannabis devotees. How big is that? Big enough that current avenues for buying new and recent factory teas are long inadequate.

Current Outlets for Factory Puerh

Right now puerh buyers are fairly well served if a buyer is looking for fresh, proprietary blends of tea from small, individually-owned online puerh vendors. These are house teas and they form the bulk of easily available teas to the American buyer. Really these teas are an incredible gift to puerh buyers. But I have to say that a large contingent of puerh buyers, maybe even the majority of buyers, are also interested in factory puerh teas, if not exclusively so. Even buyers who purchase fresh boutique blends still dabble a finger into factory teas now and again. But the reality is very few vendors sell new and recent factory puerh teas. Very few vendors sell semi-aged teas also, but aged tea is always going to be a secondary re-sale market, unlike for new and recent teas. 

Hard to believe that all these years later, anyone wanting to buy new or recent factory teas is still looking to Yunnan Sourcing and primarily their China location (the US shop currently has one raw Dayi beeng for sale). Aside from Yunnan Sourcing, the few vendors offering factory teas dwindle to a handful of tea shops, with a handful of teas, or enterprising individuals doing special orders or even Taobao buying. Just as Mike Petro worked the translation software all those years ago, nowadays people are plugging in Google translate just to access new and recent vintage factory teas. Western vendors have little to no interest in selling factory teas, and the few people who do offer these teas do so as a courtesy rather than as a focus. Buyers are left to work Taobao or buy teas from other collectors rather than via official or tax-legal market channels. 

What the Buyer is looking for.

North American puerh buyers develop a sophisticated set of preferences for puerh very quickly. The buying community learns fast that spring raw sheng puerh is more desirable than summer or autumn harvests. People want teas with strong bitter and astringent profiles, not the sweet, drink-now versions that some factories are trying to market. People want to age their teas and enjoy their development with varying degrees of success, and this is the fun of the hobby for many. 

Buyers are well versed in the history of puerh teas, and know that the best vintages from the past are factory made, and some are recipe teas and therefore people want an amount of factory tea in their collection. Access to these teas is not as straightforward as might be the case, due to several issues.

Mismatched Markets.

Chinese puerh factories have no need to sell sheng puerh teas to the western market because the Asian market is more than adequate. When the Taetea 7542 of the year reaches over $300/beeng in resale we know the market has little impetus to offer retail 7542 anywhere outside of China. Not to mention the rare special edition teas which rarely see the light of day in western buying outlets. By western buying outlets, I primarily mean Yunnan Sourcing. We also have a few sources like King Tea Mall from Guangzhou, which is a fine seller but again located in China and not in North America. Here too we don't find special edition teas and we pay a premium for resale and shipping, again to be expected.

The biggest mismatch, however, is the actual interest Chinese factories currently have in selling to the west. When reading puercn news and meeting with tea factories at events like the World Tea Expo, the main interest factories have is in selling shou puerh and also "excess tonnage" of tea to the west. Excess tonnage includes summer and autumn tea and anything leftover from late spring which probably also means shou puerh products. Yet where the real money is right now is for sheng puerh products, rather than shou puerh. People want access to the same sheng products factories are producing primarily for Asian markets. 

Non-specific Warehouse Vendors.

Sheng puerh teas can be found in warehouse model vendors like Awazon at Amazon. Occasionally teas sell on eBay but most buyers view eBay as a less desirable way to purchase tea due to the possibility of fakes. Aliexpress had factory puerh teas at one point, but Aliexpress banned the sale a few years ago which was a loss of access for North American buyers. Taobao is even more difficult now, and sometimes boots online accounts from the west, and requires a buying agent and navigating in Chinese. 

People are still buying from Yunnan Sourcing after so many years. We have to give props to Yunnan Sourcing for offering at least some factory teas, even if most of these are ripe shou teas. But Yunnan Sourcing is a large vendor with their own house teas and equal if not greater emphasis on other types of Chinese tea. Scott has spoken about looking for a way to retire someday, and so this single outlet which barely meets the demand will not be around forever. 

Boutiques and Tea Shops.

Small outlets like these are not able to adequately serve buyers looking for factory teas. I would include possible ideas like franchising, such as when Taetea licenses small dealers as official retailers. The problem here is the lack of access to capital to purchase stock up front and then sell it. We don't have a retail loan structure for puerh vending because the financial world by and large is still ignorant of Chinese tea. 

Then we have a problem experienced by nearly all small boutique retailers. The further away distance-wise the retailer is from the factory source, the lower the priority for stock. This is an issue in every designer goods sector. The retailer has plenty of buyers, but is not getting in the stock needed to satiate the buying appetite of the customers. Most designer boutiques have this problem, lots of buyers but the shop doesn't get priority from the factory label for shipments. This is where a franchise model in the US is likely to fail. Not only is retail space expensive, but a US location is on the low end of the totem pole compared to Asian locations. A franchise won't get enough stock for the size of the puerh buying community.

And how big is that buying community again? We are large enough at this point with enough dollars that a single retail location shipment could be bought up entirely by one buyer. Just think if that 2021 7542 had made it to a retail location in the US at the original retail price. One person easily would swoop all that tea up in a single buy, and any appearance online would result in inquiries from overseas buyers as well. This is yet again why a small shop or boutique-style vendor or franchise cannot possibly keep up with customer demand for factory sheng puerh, even if that shop had adequate access to stock which it likely won't at such a distance. We have all too many buyers with the money to buy up tongs and tongs of tea, single-handedly. Then we have huge group buying efforts to pool money and split tong purchases. Good luck to any retailer looking to keep up with this kind of behavior. It won't happen. 

Addressing the Mismatched Market.

We want more than the dusty tea brick from a local market shop. But we can't simply apply more pressure to existing outlets. Something has to give in the Chinese market to improve sales and access to North America. We have the buyers. We have plenty of money to spend. What can be done to improve access to sheng puerh tea?

Warehouse-model selling.

Chen Sheng Hao has taken the step of opening a warehouse in Vancouver. North American buyers can now access these teas through this warehouse. However, their pricing and products are on the top tier end. Right now I am sure the customers in this market need convincing that CSH teas are worth $1000/beeng. I don't think buyers are certain CSH teas are of a quality to merit this price tag, and if the teas are, then people need experience trying the teas to find out. The main market is looking to buy lower, at the under $100/beeng price point but in bulk.

Yet the warehouse model is precisely what is needed to meet consumer demand because the small boutique does not have the capital nor the priority. More factories will hopefully follow the example of Chen Sheng Hao and open warehouse options in North America with teas at a lower price point.

Develop and sell new recipe teas and teas with a picking standard.

Do what you do well. Customers want spring teas and especially teas with a bitter and astringent profile designed for aging and warm humid weather. Factories could develop new recipes and productions for everyone, everywhere, that could incorporate some of that excess summer and autumn tonnage blended with spring tea. Or offer more premium blends that adhere to a picking standard, such as the one-bud-two-leaf, rather than the chopped over-oxidized mess that many productions use. 

Once a customer develops a taste for aged raw puerh, they are more open to drinking shou and other heicha teas like Fu Zhuan and bamboo stored Liu Baos. Cultivate the raw sheng customer with the carrot of what they want, and other teas are likely to benefit from increased sales. 

Open up factory-direct and Taobao with English service and shipping. 

I realize this is a diplomatic stretch involving many cultural factors. I know China does not need our puerh business. But North American puerh buyers are a well-educated and gainfully employed lot, in a variety of industries, and they drink tea at work. Sommeliers are more popular in food service and we have thriving $100/session puerh service in fine restaurants in places like New York City. Many unknown business connections into the future may be gained in North America in the same way as puerh enhances business relationships and diplomacy in China. 

Support the secondary puerh market by offering factory teas.

More factory teas in the hands of collectors means more tea for potential resale later as aged teas in our own markets, which leads to more interested tea drinkers buying new. It's a cycle. To expand our aged offerings so we don't need middlemen in Asia, we need to buy teas direct when they are new and recent and more cost-effective. 

Over the past year, we read lots of bad news about Chinese-North American relations and attitudes. Yet I can assure the reader that the opposite is the case with regard to Yunnanese sheng puerh tea. More and more people are attracted to this tea and yet the buyer opportunities, especially for factory teas, have hardly changed in the past twenty years. Tea is consumed and gone forever, and so the market only increases in demand. The buyers here are legion and ready to spend money when opportunities arise and we need more legitimate and direct sales options to meet the increasing demand.

Photo credit: photos shown are by the kindness and permission of Lew Perin (photographer) and Mike Petro. 

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. 

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.

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. 

Letter to a Prioress 2

Mother’s Day 2020

Dear Prioress__,

I can hardly believe more than two years have passed since I last wrote. I was not sure I would write again, but as before you walked through one of my dreams, this time in the company of Prioress K. I remember from my days at your house. So, I write now on a friendly whim, waving to you and her, if she is still with you. My odd menopausal (yes) dreams send me on many a whim, they speak my age. I take comfort in the fact you are older than I am, oh so snitty, but one of us must be older, right? I’m glad it is not me. Though of course you are still a young thing in the religious life for some, and I am sure an occasional reminder of that from a fellow sister is not too unwelcome.

Today I enjoyed reviewing the monastery website, really it is so well crafted and a pleasant journey to peruse. Though I felt sorry to see Sister T. passed in January, I read her obit several times. She got more lovely to look at as she got older, only one of her many gifts. I recognize more than a few names on the obituaries, and of course of my own bunch I know them all. My brain doesn’t process all those names, and I carry on as though everyone is still with us, trying to tell what stories I can of them. I know I am one of the few people left who remembers my own people. At any rate, I enjoyed the photos especially of the chapel. Easy to look at the spring flowers here and remember how pretty the grounds are at the college.

That’s the best I can say of today, for I can only imagine the challenges before you with the college shut and everything to worry about with this wretched pandemic. The messages on the website have a transparent, open feel which I really appreciate. I know of other sites that don’t address the pandemic quite so directly other than perhaps a donation made or some such.

The difficulty with servant leadership is when people want an absolute dictator rather than take on the challenge of collegiality. I remember learning from one of my own leaders that for her the leadership challenge during a painful period of history was not the decisions made but living forever with second guessing whether anything else should have been done. That and probably grieving the period longer than anyone else did. I imagine the Liturgy of the Hours with the schedule is sustaining, one has the next hour to go to.

As for me I am well, and probably have more time for contemplation than the average monastic for I am not too busy these days. I have time to write and think as I had hoped for much earlier in my life than is probably true of most people. Though it may not seem so from this letter, I am not terribly inclined to dwell on the past but find myself interested in what is going on now. Certainly we are in the most unusual of times.

Where I live people don’t truly understand the need to self-isolate, the mentality is a child being told what to do by a parent and thus no one wants to go along with the state plan. They don’t see the horrible decisions resulting from overwhelming the hospitals, that of deciding who gets precious resources and who might not, and who might not live. Thus far we have avoided this scenario in my area, but lord only knows the same could happen later this year with winter. I hate to say so but the difference seems to run between those with some education and those without, for anyone given the old classroom problem of who goes off the drowning boat recognizes the awful situation at once. If no one got the problem of who to throw off the boat, you never think about the reality of a situation happening with shared resources, when they run out. No, too many people just think they are being dictated to by an overlord rather than accepting their part in collegial living. Funny how people don’t want that overlord but then suddenly they do. Growing pains. I knew a W. Franciscan Sister V. once who used to always ask “when will society make a leap, do you think we are in a leap?” She always felt the leap was just before us, and perhaps it is just ahead but some days this feels like chasing a carrot on a long stick. I am no gentle help myself, the gifts I bring are either humor or sharp chaos.

My dream is always I am naked in the chapel. Tell your newly professed they can avoid the naked chapel dreams as long as they stay.

I’m down to a very few college pals staying in touch. We were informed that our class had the worst record for staying in touch and gathering, and it’s probably true. Most recently I stayed in touch with F. and also Sister S. S. recently removed her Facebook account for some reason. I can’t really blame her, I’m not a huge fan of Facebook myself. The way it tracks people, I feel like I need a digital or actual shower after viewing it, I clear out caches frantically afterward. Unfortunately, most of my friends and family use it to stay in touch so I can’t completely disengage.

In S’s case, I wonder if the Catherine Cesnik movie had anything to do with it, the backlash against the SSNDs was uncalled for. I offered to help with that case because I can access the seminary archives in Baltimore, the requirement to get in is having a deceased family member seminarian, and I do. My father went to the same seminary in Baltimore and was in the same class as the priests in the film. But they wanted me to work on something else I didn’t have qualifications for, some sort of police trace work. The only bit I felt I could qualify to do is the seminary records, so I declined.

Otherwise, I am trying to stay as healthy as I can. I live with my son and we have two cats, and an elderly man with mental illness who lives with us and has for many years. He went through an episode recently which was challenging, and he has these every so often. I hope he can stay healthy because during the episode he didn’t understand the need to stay home. But now he is doing better and stays home more.

I hope this letter was not too much a burden to read, I send you thoughts and prayers.

We're Really Lucky

Today I am thanking the good gods who made me a puerh tea hoarder. If you're like me, we started early enough on our collections to sit pretty today on a chair made of tongs. I need not worry about how long viruses last on packages and tea because I have my own dirt built right up into my collection to enjoy. Ditto the teaware, I can go at least a month without washing anything and drink tea every day. I need not worry about crawling from my bed in a desperate search for clean tea ware, I have a whole display case with the best of the best just awaiting my whims.

Not that I don't have worries. I have a denier in my household named Mr. B. who is now in a full-blown manic episode. Try sheltering in place with a manic person, you have all the entertainment you need for 20 hours a day, just the talking itself lasts for a good 15. I get to while away my time listening to all kinds of rambling, singing and whistling. Mr. B. likes to listen to quack AM radio stations and says the virus is a Hoax to enable the government to impose martial law. So he sees no reason to curtail his goings about in the community. In fact, he is gone at the moment and I have no clue where he is. I can't stop him myself and I expect to pay whatever price he does, although Mr. B. has been kind enough to pay me in weed. My son too has to go out to work his food related part time job, so at this point my own behavior probably won't matter much and thus I can smoke and drink my life away before something worse surely gets me.

I feel bad for people who need to hoard toilet paper. In a pinch I have plenty of bamboo and paper wrappers, and even a bamboo tea scoop with a handle the consistency of a corn cob. People around here say nothing good comes from China, they haven't a clue how good I have it and so I need not pack heat like the guy who owns the smoke shop down the street with a revolver at his belt. My tea is not a fire hazard when safely ensconced in large crocks like every good farm lady does with her food.

In fact, my plan is a healthy 7542 to beat the scourges of the ages and I'd get that tattooed on my arm if the governor hadn't closed the ink parlors. I bought coffee just in case, apparently the more green the tea the more alkaline, and acid is what we need to fight viruses. One jar of instant coffee suffices, I don't need to build up a stockpile of what won't get drunk. Mr. B hoards coffee anyway. I feel so good playing with my tuos and ever so glad the rest of the world around me knows squat all about puerh tea. Just think of the supply problem if the neighbors caught on.

So cheer up and carry on, my fellow puerh hoarding friends. Let us enjoy the goodness of the Yunnan harvests in the comfort of our homes. Keep in touch, people. I'd love to know what you are choosing to drink up in the days to come.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Enjoy My Tea

What shall I drink today? My old green Dayi looks good. Yes, I drank that last week. Last week, so I should really drink something else in my collection, maybe my Nakas or Nannuos or what about that Taiwan-stored Yiwu? No, no, no. No wet stuff, my digestion is a little bit off, or the meds are off, or I am just off.

Something newer might be nice, how about that white2tea blend, or some CYH, except that stuff is in the big crock, such a hassle, no wait, I moved those, the old pumidor teas, except they aren’t all together anymore, I might need to search one by one. Of course the CYH is in experimental conditions so I really cannot touch those right now, wouldn’t be healthy, and not much difference to notice at this point anyway. What about the Hekai? Oh, I just had one not too long ago, I should save that for a diuretic day.

Okay, in the meantime, how about a teapot? I suppose a gaiwan, except that I use those for the blog, how boring, this is my chance to use an actual teapot if I’m not writing. Clay teapots are so nice. But they are not terribly appropriate for young teas, muddy up the nice fresh texture, much better for older teas that need something removed from the taste like wetness or something acrid. Stoneware is easy, for the most part, but naturally does not do much for older teas. I should decide on the tea before worrying about which teapot to use.

And we now know that the size of the teapot makes a difference in heat retention. If I use a young tea, I might have a larger amount in a session and therefore a larger pot might be okay, but if I dip into my older teas I need a tiny pot, gotta make those older teas last after all. Too much room in the teapot and the water just does not stay hot. And then we have the question of heat retention in clay versus porcelain, stoneware, etc. All these variables and so the size of the teapot really will depend upon which tea I am going to drink today.

Instead, how about the cups? Normally I use a clear cup for the blog or Instagram, should I take a photo today? If so, people want the color and a dark cup shows nothing but a black, inky abyss regardless of the tea. I haven’t posted on IG in awhile, I really should take a photo, but do I need a photo to ruin the experience of the tea. Some days I just prefer to drink alone, without the camera and dusting off the table and paw prints and keep my hands free, mouth free, lap free. I don’t think for the camera, the social moment, no one gives a rat’s arse what the hell I’m drinking anyway, and fool to think the world cares.

Oh, well. The green Dayi it is, then.

On the Lake

On Pike Lake in northern Wisconsin where I grew up, nearly all of the houses were built high above the water. To reach the lake, you had to get down thirty or more feet of embankment covered with oak and birch trees, and numerous plants including poison ivy. Homeowners put in long flights of stairs made of wood or brick, or carved out winding dirt paths. A neighbor’s house, however, was the only home built right on the water, on a small peninsula that I can only describe as a bit of fairy land.

In this house dwelt a reclusive old timer somewhere in his seventies or eighties. Although the neighborhood, while still forest-y in most places, was largely residential, at one point this old timer small-farmed his property. To reach the road, he had to go up a quarter mile or so, and on the way he had forest on the right hand, and bits of open field on the left and up near his square brick garage which held an old car he drove once in awhile to the store. I surmised he must have farmed a bit because he sold part of his property to my father which included a “boathouse,” in actuality a small animal barn.

In the back of the barn was a dried out old chicken coop with tiered wood nesting areas, ancient brown straw and rusty chicken wire. The barn’s attic must have served as a hay mow, because the ceiling inside had a square opening with no ladder and the front of the attic had a large door into which farmers usually pitchfork up hay or straw. My guess is the farmer grew straw for his chickens and pitched it up into the mow, because although he had enough room for a cow or two, he would not have had sufficient pasture to support these. He must have stopped farming sometime in the 1940s or 1950s. My father used the small barn alternatively as a boathouse, tentatively as a party spot with an old wood bar, and a garden house when he put in a vegetable garden for a few years. Later on we made a playhouse there.

But the old man’s property is still with me now, because we played there so often. His very plain old farmhouse looked a bit like this.

Many an early 20th century farmhouse looked like this.
photo of Dane County 1910 house
by Joann M. Ringelstetter

Imagine this house on a small peninsula jutting out on the water surrounded by lake and forest. He had a small, rickety red dock on one side over the lily pads and another larger boat dock at the end of the peninsula where the water had a sandy bottom instead of muddy weeds. The grass around his house was a soft sort of grass that didn’t need mowing. And a small patch of what I can only call fairy grass always grew down by the water, with a moss edging at the start of the forest. This grass felt lovely on bare feet.

I don’t remember much about the old timer, except he used to visit the apple tree that he had put in, or my father did, right on the edge of the property. One day he brought up a stool and picked up fallen apples from the ground. My brother and I spotted him sitting under the apple tree. I was four or five years old and my brother three, perhaps. The old man cracked acorns from the red oak trees on my father’s property just below. He beckoned us over.

“These are good to eat,” he said, cracking open a few acorns.

We tried the acorns which were so bitter we ran, spitting them out and laughing. The old man laughed too, but continued to eat them himself. Later on when I broke open green acorns and pinched the nuts sometimes they broke apart into powder. I read about how people made flour from acorns back in the old days, and that idea made sense to me when remembering the old man eating from the oak trees.

“Oh that never happened,” my father said years later, when I told him about the old man feeding us acorns.

“It did too happen,” I insisted. He shook his head.

After all, I had tried nearly every plant possible that grew in the forest, right down to the stems of the water lilies. I even tried some poisonous plants, like the sumac, though I wasn’t stupid enough to eat the berries or the leaves. But sumac branches can be peeled and split open, the spongy core inside is pleasant to chew like gum. I know the acorn story is true because I could just as easily have tried eating the acorns on my own, and surely I would remember learning for myself how they taste. I didn’t need to make up a story about the old timer living in the house below us, feeding acorns to me and my brother.

But the real lure of his property was the truly fairy quality of the water, the grass and the forest. I imagine he worked out a rural living during the Depression and war years on his chickens, maybe a goat, acorns and berries. Ducks laid eggs in the woods near the water, and fish were easy to catch right from the shore, or on the ice in winter. With a bit of coffee, salt, flour and butter I bet that old man got by just fine with his eggs, some squirrels, duck, fish and maybe a deer or two. I remember water and sewer lines were put in all down his driveway when I was about seven or so, after the old timer died and a wealthy family from Madison bought his property to use as a summer house. I shudder to think what the old man did for sewer before that.

In winter, my brother and I used the long dirt ruts of the driveway as a sledding track. When the snow packed just right, we could sled all way down and around to the water, so fast we ended up well out onto the lake ice. A long walk back up and down again we flew. One magical winter the Madison family children visited their summer home, they were young adults and joined in on the sledding at night, turning on the outdoor lights, grabbing one of us little kids and jumping onto the sled. The family didn’t visit often.

So in summer time, the rest of the property was our playground. We found beds of moss covered with canopies of bushes that became imaginary houses. We found an old tree house in the woods, not much left except the sturdy platform and a few beams, maybe a deer stand rather than a playhouse. We went into the old man’s garage and looked at his car, and later the boat kept there by the Madison family. I don't remember what kind of car the old man had, but it was big and old, not like my dad's blue Chevy.

I dressed up in long dresses and ran barefoot over the soft grass, imagining I was a princess. The house faced the lake to the northwest, and only in summer could the sun reach the house. In the late summer afternoon, the sun shone golden on the peninsula and shimmered along the dock.

My brother pulled out fish after fish off the old man’s dock every time it rained. We lost our lures in the pine trees on the shore. Huge bull frogs lived in the lily pads around the peninsula, until we fished them all out for the legs my dad enjoyed frying up. Bullhead fish with stingers nested near shore and we caught them, for dad knew how to cook those too. Big sunfish and northern pike roamed the shoreline and huge snapping turtles, all of which we caught, cleaned and ate, sometimes in huge neighborhood turtle roast parties. I found wintergreen berries in winter and chewed the leaves. Yes, I am certain the old man got along just fine, back when he was the only one living on that land.

One early summer when I was a young teenager, I walked around the mossy woods above the old man’s house and saw asparagus, a huge patch of stalks eighteen inches tall and some even taller. I never saw asparagus there before. I know that asparagus can return year after year, but who planted it, and when? I ran back to the house and coaxed my father to come look. After some convincing, he walked out there and sure enough, we cut down a lot of asparagus that day. The stalks looked like magic staves coming up from the weedy green forest floor, wielded by the wizardly tall birch trees. I peeled their paper and cut plaque fungus for carving, wondering what else I could make from birch bark. I knew about Chippewa canoes, but only later seeing Russian birch bark basket art did I understand fully possibilities I could only intuit as a child.

The old man never invited us into his house, and we didn’t dare go close when we saw him about. But later on when playing near his house, long after it became a summer home, we noticed two small doors at ground level. We opened these, and they clearly held yard tools in a space under the house. But we were small enough to play in there, under the trellis-covered open spots beneath the house. One day, while playing under the house we found an old iron key. Indeed it was a key to the house. Finally we could see the inside of the house we only imagined before, the house on the fairy peninsula. The key opened one of the doors, and in we went.

To our surprise, the inside of the house had yellow, pine wood paneled walls, and plain tweed furniture, like maybe early 1960s small couches, chairs, lots of very basic places to sit. We saw a tiny kitchen and even tinier bedrooms. At this point the house was just an ordinary summer cabin, like so many others on lakes in Wisconsin at that time. The fancy new owners clearly hadn’t done much of anything to improve the place. It looked like the old man still lived there with an old coffee can and not much else. We didn’t take or touch anything, but we kept the key to the fairy house, which was just an ordinary wood farm house after all.

Yet the fairy peninsula was everything, still is everything, all of my religious vocation, the spiritual pursuits, the soft grasses and mosses and herbs, the chicken coop, the trees and the asparagus. Thinking of it brings me a timeless peace, for the land there never flooded and the house still stands even after more than a century. In my mind’s eye I still stand on the grass beneath the trees there in the summer sun during the moments of greatest duress, in moments of violence and human horror, bare feet on damp moss in a place of no fear. Often I have wondered what people do without this, though I suppose in a city children may find secret places of repose. I know people speak of Central Park this way, even in the middle of New York City.

In a moment’s flash of memory, I may stand near the two doors where the yard tools were, where we found the key and now I have a fresh, new puerh cake in my hand, still in the wrapper, still yet to be opened and known. I buy my tea with the same fairy promise, in the moment before using the key. I can hold the cake now open in the wrapper, me in my long dress, the old man up above with his acorns. The acorns and the house look like magic, but inside they are plain and bitter. The tea itself chids me for believing the wrapper, for getting lost in the trees and the white lilies. “Use the key,” it says, because now the chicken coop helps me more than the lake does.

I should find a photo of the place, I think to myself, for all that it meant to me, still my mind’s spot to lose myself. Looking around on the net, oh, I find one! The property was sold not long ago.

photo WoodburyRealtors property listing

The house has gained many sections, owners adding onto the original house, obscuring it. Now the house is huge, I suppose as large as most people want today. But it takes over the peninsula, dominates it, rather than merely sitting upon it, letting the bit of land be the nature’s miracle it is. Yet, vestiges of what I recall remain. I see the soft patch of ever green grass on the far left, as it always was, and the lily pads still growing on the lake. The trees still jut from the shore, and the forest is actually denser. Despite the haphazard additions to the house, obviously the owners see something of the magic by their choice of adding cathedral windows to better enjoy the lake views. The style doesn’t fit the plain old farm house, but a bit of church and castle in their choices reassures me that they feel what I felt. The previous inhabitants honor the forest magic in their own way, even if the overly large house tries to suck all of it out from the peninsula.

I feel certain now the wood paneling inside is long gone, and the interior matches the promises outdoors. The house probably has an amazing bath and fancy kitchen. Surely this is so, for the photo is from a real estate listing which says the property sold for $399,000. The old man probably never imagined this kind of money. Or maybe he knew all along, as we did, that what he held onto for so many years, so plain and ordinary for him, is someday worth so much more.

Bang Dong and Balls: Sheng Olympics 2017

This year’s Sheng Olympics by LiquidProust Teas in conjunction with various tea vendors is an exciting opportunity to sample a variety of sheng puerh teas for not a lot of money. I missed out on Sheng Olympics last year to my abiding regret, mainly after a couple of bad group buys soured me on shared tea buying. Half the fun, of course, is drinking and sharing the same teas with a number of people at the same time. It's not a bad deal money-wise.

Sheng Olympics puerh sampler

The package includes anywhere from 10-12g of each tea plus a really cool Yunnan sticker. You get Bitterleaf Teas 2016 Alter Ego Mansa Huang Pian, and 2016 Autumn Straight Bulang No Chaser. From Crimson Lotus Teas we get a Midas Touch tea ball. From Yunnan Sourcing we get the Hi-Tech Dragon Tea ball,  and both 2010 and 2015 Autumn Bang Dong. From Tea Urchin we have 2012 Bang Dong to compare to the YS offerings. Finally we get an exclusive white2tea 2016 Tuhao as Fk tea ball, which isn’t in my group tea photo here because I’d already consumed it. I have the wrapper though.

All this cost $25, or $20 if you got the recent discount, and shipping to my address cost just $3 or so. To order all these samples separately from each of the tea companies would cost so much more just for shipping than for this whole package. Spreading out the cost among dozens of people makes this buy possible. Otherwise a tea package like this is, well, frankly impossible to acquire. Unfortunately as of this writing, the package seems to have sold out.

Wrapper from 2016 Tuhao as Fk exclusive tea ball

LiquidProust is probably best known on Reddit tea forums for offering free puerh samples to newbies, an effort which has cost him a lot of money and to which many puerh heads have donated excess tea. His blog is well worth a read though. As his name implies, his efforts in tea are directed toward a theme: can a tea experience resemble good literature, such as if Proust turned into liquid tea, what would this tea taste like? One of his recent blog posts in pursuit of this theme created a “Narnia” tea, which is a white tea wrapped in silver leaf. Not sure what that tastes like, but I found the post interesting and the tea rather beautiful and tweeted it in case any foodies out there are looking for a themed tea.

The puerh tea world is rather devoid of well-read, literary people in the US, where for some reason tea attracts science types more often than literary folks. LiquidProust states his inspiration around Proust was his read of what I assume is the entirety of In Search of Lost Time. My own reading of Proust began and ended with Vol. V, The Prisoner, perhaps an unfortunate choice. I’m certain Proust is back in vogue now after years of firmly out until someone “out-ed” Proust, and his Albertine as very likely a disguised Albert. 

Knowing this intrigues me further when someone names his straight avatar LiquidProust, winning more admiration last year when I checked out his other social media. I found a rather frank journey from a conservative Christian background to exploring other faiths, including one rather impromptu visit to a synagogue’s Sabbath service, an adventure he defended later among the inebriated friends who joined him. The young man has a lot more going on with his inner journey than just a narrow obsession with tea, displaying expansiveness in his thinking, To wit, tea is a point from which to explore and find common experiences with other people. While tea-as-literature adds a layer of thinking beyond what the tea itself presents, this theme is indeed a point of view lending toward open discussion rather than closed debate, and a theme which LiquidProust takes on with more than a little enthusiasm. 

I am certain he won’t feel comfortable with my musings here, or the fact that I’ve read a lot of his past social posts even back in his college years. Just to clarify, I read a great deal on people whose thinking I find interesting. I’ve read tea blogs in their entirety front to back, and tea forums with hundreds of pages. I only take the time to do this when I find intelligent people. In LiquidProust’s energetic postings I find themes of spiritual searching, literature, tea, sex, work, and what the ancient Greeks called koinonia, in communion or community with others. I have tried chatting with Mr. LiquidProust in sentences which include all of these themes in a rather compressed fashion, but my efforts mostly evoke a bit of paranoia from him, wondering if I am criticizing. Not my intention at all. Perhaps I am a bit fumbling and not so socially graceful, adding too many layers into what I try to say, perhaps poorly, obscuring my intention to pay the highest compliment I feel I can give to anyone, to address the entirety of pure intelligence. For he is a rare person.

Might not look like a lot of leaf,
but this is a 200 ml gaiwan.
Had to move the tea from the teapot above.

Anyway, on to the tea! The Tuhao as FK teaball is a highlight for me, as I own the 2015 cake but have not yet tried the 2016. Those of us participating in Sheng Olympics were to drink it on Christmas Eve, but I fell asleep early and slept through the entire evening. I finally got down to the tea a few days later. This tea ball is a LOT of Tuhao, much more I than I would use in a session. Tuhao as Fk is not a wimpy tea.

Thick stems

However, I wish I’d waited a year or two because the tea ball is still very green and due to the compression is not yet out of the green tea stage. You can see from my photos the greenish tint to the brew. The 2016 version is every bit as durable as last year. I needed five days and about 26 steeps and the tea still isn’t done yet. 

Red is a complementary color of green,
so any green visually appears brighter.

The brew starts out floral and rather bitter, and only at steep 13 or so honey notes emerge. Yet even after 18 steeps a bit too long on the brew time and I’m rewarded with punishing bitterness. My last steep at 26 still had the bitterness and honey note, the tea is lighter at that point, yet nowhere near done. Leaves are mostly a bud plus two leaves, with thick stems. This tea is huge on huigan, Tuhao is just a big Las Vegas of a tea, and well worth the money to buy and store away.

Steep 24, green brew mellows somewhat to a honey color.

Tea balls seem like a great travel option, but in fact they are challenging to brew and require far more time than a chunk from a beeng. Tuhao is a glorious tea, as wonderful an opportunity as this custom pressing is, at the same time it’s a waste of tea. Tea balls made from such fine tea are really a waste for me because I can’t break up the tea ball and drink less. From what I can tell, others drinking this Tuhao tea ball finished up with it in one evening. I rather doubt they drank 20 steeps, but if sharing with other people, then perhaps one evening is feasible. I think I understand now why mini teas use so-so tea so that you don’t feel guilty drinking some of it and then tossing it out.

Such leaf quality for a tea ball!

Regretfully I tossed those fine leaves after steep 26 and brewed up the 2010 Autumn Bang Dong by Yunnan Sourcing. This tea is available for $56 from the China site for 400g. The leaves are tiny and the tea brews up with a spicy, pecan pie scent. My first two brews left my gaiwan stuck to the plate with sticky tea. The sugars are emerging from the cell walls within, and I expect this tea to develop more stickiness because the aging is coming along nicely. Comparing my gaiwan of leaves with the photos on the listing the aging is obvious, my tea is browning while the original photo shows a very bright green.

2010 Bang Dong aging apparent when comparing the listing on YS.

I leafed this tea heavy with 7g in 60ml gaiwan, and my heavy hand is punished with a bitter, yet medium thick brew with vanilla and spicy nuts. The tea thickens noticeably around steeps 4-6, and slowly thins from there. Spicy notes are typical of many autumn puerh teas, and this one tastes rather traditional with hay, spices and vanilla. This is one of those puerh teas that approaches a barrel whiskey type experience, albeit a fairly comfortable brew compared to actual liquor. I've learned that Yunnan Sourcing productions are best leafed heavy, especially after TeaDB found out how heavy Mr. Wilson himself leafs a gaiwan. To know what he sees in a tea, I feel I must also go heavy. This 2010 is a nice value drinker, a huge 400g cake costs the same as many cakes half this size. 

Steep 4

I plan to get to the other Bang Dong teas later. While the idea of a comparison between these teas is a great idea, I don’t expect the teas to truly compare, and not simply because of differences in storage or age. Tea terroir has changed a great deal in the past seven years, and Bang Dong area yields a variety of tea and quality too. I’m not sure a 2010 or 2012 tea even from the same trees is the same in 2015. I'm guessing the Bang Dong + Balls is more about the implied pun in this tea sampler. 

Bitterleaf’s Alter Ego is comprised of the huang pian from their spring production of WMD Mansa, a tea which sold out early and packs quite a tea high. I’ve heard from other tea drinkers that this same tea high experience is in the huang pian brick. Price-wise, the tea costs the same as white2tea’s Fade, $24.50 for a 200g brick. Tea chatters debate which tea is the better one, with some preferring Alter Ego to Fade. I haven’t had a chance to try Alter Ego yet, but when I do I will post some notes on Steepster.

Looks like the Sheng Olympics might sell out, I hope you didn't miss out on picking up this sample pack from LiquidProust, It's fun to share tea with other people drinking at the same time, and I will look forward to trying the rest of the teas at some point. This week I received a generous package of samples of CYH teas and I will get into these next. I seem to drink tea more slowly than many bloggers, I apologize for that, but I try and steep them out as much as possible or drink more than one session!