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 Shopping in the New Normal

The current pandemic has accelerated demand for online shopping in general which naturally slows the progress of our tea orders as shipping services attempt to keep up. I am hearing a lot of grumbling about slow tea orders which tells me people are still buying and wondering where their packages are. Hello to the new normal.

Express Shipping

Prices for express have increased enormously, and this is because express services are flight-based. Planes are grounded and airlines are struggling to stay in business. Demand is far higher than available service. I would not pay for Express shipping myself, I would either do cargo boat or do without.

Cargo

This is the slow boat service which took two months prior to the new normal, and is now 3-4 months minimum. Boats are less affected in the new normal, but demand is even higher with flights grounded. Hence prices go up accordingly.

So, what can you do about tea shopping? Know that any shipping from Asia is going to take twice as long as before. Any shipping from outside your own country is longer. I recently ordered pet meds from New Zealand and this package took a month, which isn't too bad but twice as long as last year for the same order.

Thank goodness this wasn't tea ware.

Part of the grumbling I am hearing about is the increase of chargebacks by customers against tea companies for packages not arriving fast enough. This behavior is motivated in part by payment services like Paypal which has a 60 day refund window. If you don't get your package in this time frame, you can apply for a refund. However, this is killing tea sellers who rely on cargo boat shipping.

Should you order puerh from China at this time? Seems to me this divides buyers into two categories, the casual and the hardcore. Which are you? If you can't afford to wait out shipping times past a 60 day limit, consider yourself a casual buyer right now. Or just keep your orders to small amounts and place more orders rather than huge orders to keep your losses small if something doesn't arrive. While most sellers will reship, the fault is probably not in their control. Lost packages are both a cost of doing business, but also in the new normal a cost of the consumer if the tea ordered is no longer available.

A faster option is to look at tea buying closer to home. This favors the shopper who is looking for drinker quality tea, rather than collector quality. In fact, you might want to check local options before placing an overseas order to see if you can find an acceptable drinker to carry you through the new normal this year.

Give tea sellers a break, it isn't their fault shipping is so slow. Wait out an acceptable amount of time, if you choose boat shipping expect to wait four months. Contact the seller before doing a chargeback, you might get options like a reship or store credit. Again, if you can't afford to wait out the shipping, you probably can't afford tea buying.

Some retailers to consider:

Yunnan Sourcing has a US-based warehouse and is ramping up the offerings. Another retailer selling new tea is Crimson Lotus Tea with their Seattle-based Inventory selections. Surprise, you can buy some white2tea selections online from Macha Tea Company in Wisconsin. If you prefer Taiwan storage, consider either Beautiful Taiwan Teas or Teas We Like. In Canada, Vancouver-based Chinese Tea Shop is offering a 15% discount for online orders $60 and above.

No-Buy Anxiety

I haven't bought any puerh in a really long time. My last puerh buy is now out of memory. Of course I have plenty of puerh, but my hongcha is now down to a couple of beengs which are not too useful in the Teforia. Looseleaf in general is not useful in a Teforia because I have to clean out the infuser. I don't know why my house cleaner won't do it for me. I asked, and got a blank look and a refusal. So I don't want to do a major haul cuz puerh temptations, right, I paid $2.59 for this mashed box of Tazo tea bags. They taste okay. Well, truthfully they are horrible.

Can't count up the problems at the moment. I'm worried about the tea harvest, who will harvest the puerh tea and who will press it into disks so all is right with the world, but everything is just wrong, wrong, wrong. No one is talking about harvest 2020 and what it means??! First we have the virus messing up the universe and marching toward me, we also have the ex-husband trapped in a Shanghai apartment with some girl named "Amy" (yes he calls her that), which is also my sister's name, trapped by the virus which might be okay by me except the unpaid bills and credit denials show up at my house and oops that VPN just is so spotty, isn't it, thank god me and mine are all in my name. Listen, when he went over there it was Anhui first, and I just got out my Anhui bacon log heichas and said "here, drink this rather than all the bother." Now look where he is, stuck in China with all the tea even though he really doesn't drink any and certainly has nowhere near the appreciation. He could have learned it and saved a crap ton of money. He doesn't give two figs about me and my tea issues, I just get emails saying "send masks." At $115 for FedEx Express. This is the sort of thing I am getting right now from China instead of useful information like early harvest reports.

Little dribbles of everything's fine out of Yunnan, but then I haunt the BBC every hour and something is not lining up. I wonder if 2020 is a year people will want to buy or maybe not until 2040, I will be long gone by then so why worry about the tea now? My puerh isn't giving me answers, and for what I have spent on puerh I not only require conversation, it needs to clean my house, do my laundry and rinse the Teforia. Safe and snug in the crocks unlike myself because when I go out every snotty kid makes a beeline toward me and cough cough cough my life grows just a bit shorter and no I won't have time to drink it all, so why buy any when the whole lot is just gonna get pawned off onto the first cash bidder my son can find. At my age I have to think about this shit whereas most of you are probably under thirty, nay under twenty I bet, and all your consideration is how to store and not where your corpse is gonna go and hongcha in the a.m. isn't a problem when you are still on Starbucks. Just wait when it all happens to you and I don't expect anyone will remember old Cwyn said it, when you get old with nothing but your puerh to keep you company, you can't buy more and no one is shipping either. Everywhere I look is end times. I tried an AA meeting but they kicked me out for trolling. I guess tea addiction doesn't count.

Okay, the benzo isn't working and I need some retail therapy. Yunnan Sourcing has a black tea sale this weekend, code BGW15. I haven't checked Yunnan Sourcing in awhile, the US site. To help me get off the Tazo and temazo I buy 2018 Drunk on Red and something called "Yuchi Rhythm 21 Organic Nectar Melody Bug Bitten Black Tea" which reminds me of a teenage grope in the poison ivy down by the lake. I really want the 2019 Man Gang Hong from Bang Dong, it's only $35 but I can resist it just thinking of what this bug bit tea is gonna do for me. In the meantime, I think I will go drink some puerh.

Why You Want Bloggers to Review Tea

All too often I read on social media that people think blogger reviews are unreliable sources of information for buying tea. People think bloggers lack in objectivity, even though tasting is an aesthetic, subjective activity. At best, tasters converge on opinion, yet even here opinions can still vary on tea, and so we can either start with the premise that bloggers are as reliable or as unreliable as anyone else. Aesthetic arguments aside, I can think of several reasons why you might want bloggers to try teas for you.

Bloggers spend their own money on the teas.

This is potentially the best reason. You get some information about an expensive tea for free. Before you go ahead and spend your own hard-earned money, why not let someone else spend money and give you a few adjectives that might match the qualities you are looking for? In many cases, bloggers buy very expensive teas that are serious buying decisions for you, and potentially an expensive mistake. Isn’t it better to get at least some information from anyone other than the vendor before diving in?

Even if the blogger gets the tea in PR, I can glean at least a flavor profile from the blog post even if I feel I must read past positives, and honestly I feel very few bloggers promote teas simply because they are free. We get too much tea, the free aspect wears thin. Most posts either are honest about the tea or the blogger won’t post at all on a tea they didn’t like. Very often vendors send teas without asking first, and too many unasked-for samples tends to remove any feeling that I must say something special. I’d rather not post at all if I don’t appreciate a tea. After all, no one is out to ruin a vendor.

Bloggers throw tea away so you don’t have to.

Making decisions to toss a tea is one of the most painful sides to the hobby, and few people I know can toss a tea no matter how bad. Even though a bad tea is probably not going to turn into a good tea someday, we hold out hope that the tea will improve enough to drink. Or maybe our tastes will change. The fact is, with the amount of tea many bloggers receive, unless we can drink it right away, we may need to decide to toss tea later that is either stale or less than cared for. We make the decisions to toss, so you don’t have to. Lest you think this is a small endeavor, may I mention that people have actually sent me tea they could not bear to throw out.

A secondary benefit here is the packaging also is tossed, and these include sample bags or other fancy packaging the teas arrive with. One person adding to the landfills rather than one hundred others over time should save you at least some small environmental impact. Let us do that rather than you.

Bloggers generally converge on the best teas.

Over the years, tea bloggers have completed blind tasting events where several choose to drink the same set of samples. Generally they converge on the same teas. I was surprised at the Yunnan Sourcing tasting we did in early 2018, how similar the opinions were. Not on every tea, of course, but I recognized my own experience when reading the notes of others.

The so-called “Blogger Effect” is bullcrap.

This is supposedly an effect where the vendor either raises prices or the stock depletes after a positive blog post goes up. First off, tying cause-and-effect with virtually no other variables is a statistically dodgy activity, but I see people doing it. I get blamed all the time for either stock depletion or the price increase. I’ve talked to several vendors about this. One vendor told me flat out he raises prices when the teas are close to sold out. The teas were already low stock by the time my post came out. In addition, most vendors do wholesale retail supply, that vendor may decide to send an order of the tea out to a tea shop or other online vendor, this is has no relationship whatsoever to the blog post.

Yet people watching the number of teas left see the stock go down and immediately assume the blog post is the reason. I’m sure bloggers sell a handful of teas, but the best teas have low stock to start out. Not unheard of either is a single buyer who purchases a large amount. (I still am stewing over a sold-out Blue Mark that a single buyer bought up before I could save the money. This purchase had nothing to do with blog posts either, the guy made his own decision.)

The truth is, no matter if a tea gets press or word of mouth, if you plan to wait until Black Friday every year, you risk teas selling out before you can get your hands on one.

Saving your Stomach

In my experience, testing teas for possible review is boring and rough on the system. Few teas are amazing enough to give me anything to talk about. A blogger sorts through literal garbage and puts their stomach and system at risk so you don’t need to.

In case none of the above is convincing enough to you to give a blogger the benefit of the doubt as to whether blog information is useful, I’m on a low buy this year. Or maybe a no-buy, except I cannot convince myself in all honesty that I will buy nothing. I have been buying puerh for a decade now, if I make it a full year without buying anything, I will be amazed. I bought less last year, but maybe I will pick up some samples. I cannot 100% say I won’t buy anything, because I’m an addict. Unless I can find another addiction.

Notable Teas

As Black Friday approaches, I push myself to brew up a few teas I purchased this year, but didn't have time to write up before. Hopefully, a couple of quick jottings will suffice, for these teas are well worth the attention.

2017 Nannuo Mini-Mushrooms by Crimson Lotus Tea

I purchased these earlier in the year, probably 6-7 months ago and stored them in a vintage Ball jar. Every so often I gave them a sniff. They are four grams each, making a nice size for those tiny teapots everyone has. I started with a cold rinse and two quick boiling rinses.

Nannuo Mini-Mushroom, my own Ball Jar with sticker

The material here is notable in that multiple years of tea were combined, some vintage tea included is apparently as old as twenty. The vintage material is what attracted me to the tea, as I like my shou older than ten if possible. I brewed in a Lin's Ceramics blue glazed teapot. 

This tea is nothing short of a revelation. Brewing hard and thick, the first 5-6 steepings taste like candy nuggets were soaked in vanilla and rolled in cocoa. I don't often find the chocolate and vanilla notes that others taste in shou, but here these flavors are unmistakable. Pile notes are only slight, this tea is as sweet as cake, and sits in the heart chakra with happiness. I must be truly happy, because I picked up the crusty soaking meatloaf pan on the stove I was avoiding til later and scrubbed it right up.

Early steeps have a slight astringency which turns to juicy when the vanilla begins to fade. Then I can taste the storage, a whiff of old buildings, reminding me of the old tunnels under the convent. The presence of ancient Illuminati confirmed. The tea starts to die out around ten steepings, but what a session! The mushrooms can be had at about a dozen for under $20. Not cheap shou, but affordable in small quantity. I should never publish these words, I should hoard this tea to which in the offing, virgins with lamps lit run.

Bulk starting at $17.99/50g crimsonlotustea.com

2015 Poundcake 2 Unreleased by white2tea

Remember the long-sold-out 2015 Poundcake, with its floral candy-like sweetness? Yes, the one we got in tea club in butt-plug form. This year, white2tea released a second version of this tea on the down-low, to tea shops only. You cannot buy it on the white2tea website, although I cannot vouch for whether bribing the owner will get you one. I do know that Macha Tea Company in Madison, WI has it, and will ship by the ounce or whole beeng. 

Poundcake 2 Unreleased
photo by machateacompany.com

I got to try this in the shop over the summer, at a delightful session with tea blogger Rambling Butterfly, who opted for another tea of her choice while I manned my own gongfu teapot. Poundcake 2 has a more traditional wood smoke processing, rather like Chawangshop's campfire version of the Lao Yu teas. Consequently the tea has a darker, more smoky incense quality and I have to say I like it better than the original Poundcake. The flavor profile has a fuller bass note that the fresher, more spring-like original lacks. 

I can see why white2tea did not offer this on the website, the original Poundcake was a popular seller, and people who liked that tea might be disappointed at a traditional version. However, people preferring a traditional olde tyme factory religion Yiwu will like this. 

Bulk by the ounce, or $80/200g + shipping, Macha Tea Company machateaco@gmail.com, Phone (01) 608.283.9286

Guangxi-Style Liu Bao by Essence of Tea

People ask me where to buy good heicha, and Essence of Tea has the most intriguing selection at the moment. EoT sources in Malaysia and currently offers not one, but two 1950s aged Liu Bao teas. While these antique teas will set my wallet back into the Dark Ages, EoT has some less expensive  "younger" offerings such as 1990s, and a curious "Betel Nut" which will give anyone new to Liu Bao a taste of the nutty flavor prized in this type of tea.

First steeping

Liu Bao is first briefly oxidized like red tea, and then pile fermented for about ten days or so. After that, the loose tea is traditionally packed in baskets for aging, or pressed into bricks such as the Three Cranes brand does. This tea I own was passed to me by a tea friend. It has the usual flavors of red tea, shou, betel nut and a tangy zip on the tongue that a lively Liu Bao gives, and settles the stomach after a heavy meal. The chunk in the photo forms during piling or later in the basket. This Liu Bao is on the youngish side still, with dry storage. I got five good steepings, which is typical. 

While aged Liu Bao isn't cheap, the prices are a bargain compared to similarly aged puerh, and a good way to get a taste of antique tea for me of modest means. 

Selections of Liu Bao, bulk prices starting at $5,Three-Leaf Liu Bao $5.40, essenceoftea.com

Taobao Puerh Group Buying

Just over a month ago I participated in a friendly Taobao group buy with some tea friends. We all paid $27 for a bunch of samples, basically beengcha purchases divided between a lot of people. This is a small amount of money to get in on some tea fun. One person usually does the work of selecting teas, ordering, collecting money via Paypal, and then dividing and mailing out the packets of tea. Usually it's fair for the person doing the work to get a little more tea from the dividing if s/he is not charging any fee. A little extra tea is the payment.

Trying to find good tea on Taobao is something of a fool’s errand, so doing a group buy like this is a good way to go rather than wasting a lot of one’s own money. If I lived in China, I would probably constantly buy off Taobao, playing the tea lottery, random beengs like scratch-off instant win tickets, except that scratch-off tickets are mostly instant-lose. How do people with a tea problem manage to live in China and still have furniture? Maybe that’s the point in a puerh collector's life when you need to open a tea shop and rent a warehouse. Otherwise, for those of us living outside of China, while some Taobao shops are starting to ship overseas, most are still only shipping within China and you need to pay an agent to order, and double shipping costs. Splitting these costs among a large group of people makes sense. 

With a Taobao cheap tea, brown and not gray is good.

This sample is labeled 2002 Mahei. I know nothing about it. Probably everyone in the group buy discussed it and I didn’t read any of the information. The leaf looks a bit autumn to me with long stemmy leaves. I decide to use a Lin’s Purion cup to mitigate…whatever needs mitigating. The chunk weighs 14g so I might as well brew the whole thing up, going with my guess that the tea is autumn. I used my 125 ml gaiwan. Three rinses, one to open up the chunk and two more, I notice the brew is on the soapy/foamy side.

The storage on this smells nice, the tea obviously had some very aggressive storage early on, based on the browning and reddish cast to the liquor, but then stored in dry conditions, leaving behind an old wood/hay smell which definitely takes time to achieve. One mark in favor of the stated age. My fear with Taobao teas is overly wet, moldy flavor and luckily none of that here.

First steep has mild bitterness and some old wood flavor, but not much else. I toss and move on to the next two steeps. The tea has more mouth-coating mild bitterness, fairly thin, smoked meat with a touch of floral. For steeps five and six I extend the brew time from flash to sitting another 10 seconds, but aside from the bit of bitterness, I just don’t taste much in this. The next two steepings are thinning out more and I brew these in my glass cup. The Lin’s cup has a floral aroma when empty. I need to make sure this isn’t due to build-up of other teas, and change to a glass cup. But my glass cup and the cha hai don’t have any residual aroma, so my Lin’s cup is now leeching other teas in. That’s actually a desirable quality of clay teaware, but not so much when evaluating one tea.

Steep 7, I didn't use a camera filter either. Picked up the red more, I guess.

After eight steepings, I am feeling the astringency now. But overall the tea just lacks flavor other than mild bitterness. At 14g/125ml I expect the tea to hit me with whatever it has to offer, just unfortunately not much here. I kinda think this is autumn tea, aged wet early on and just not holding up after that. Mahei is Yiwu-ish, less aggressive than perhaps other areas, but I remember that beautiful 2016 Chen Yuan Hao Mahei with the rare pink color, like nipples. Never mind, it’s an unfair comparison.

If you want to get in on group lottery buys, places like Steepster or even Reddit may be a good way to meet people. Just post a topic and ask, usually somebody can steer you to someone else. Who knows, you might a tea that fits your taste. After a few rounds of group buying, saving the money toward a really nice tea is probably a better plan.

Three Vendors you probably never heard of

How lucky we tea fiends are these days with all the possible vendors servicing our fix. We need every single vendor because each week we see another article online telling the world about how hot puerh tea is. Lordy, but the hoards just keep horning in on our exclusive territory with no end in sight, which just raises prices for the rest of us. We can’t shush up these articles online but maybe we can steer traffic a little bit. Here are a few websites you can bookmark, especially if you are new to tea.

Enjoying Tea

Here is a very general website with inexpensive prices. The teas offered are basic, decent and won’t break the bank for those on a budget. Carts $60+ ship for free in the US, and they take Paypal. Not really a site for great puerh, but the reviewers are real people so we can read some feedback on teas the shop has carried for a long time. Tea ware is the real bargain. I have liked everything I bought from this shop. The Yixing is not so great, but it’s good enough to test whether or not you really want to sink a couple hundred of your hard-earned dollars into a real Yixing. When you are starting out, buying inexpensive will help to appreciate better things down the road. Some items such as an aroma cup are just as useful costing $3 here as $20 and up from someplace else. What about that $1.98 glass teapot sale going on right now? No? How about the “Mini Luck” tea set for $6 from the Top Sellers list?

Pembekal Teh Taetea Garden (T & T Lifestyle) 

Here is a Malaysian shop to bookmark. The link above should go right to the Taetea products, probably what people want to see. This is a licensed Taetea shop that takes Paypal, full stop. Stuff sells out fast, like the Gold Dayi they had last month. I suspect that many inventory items never make it into the online shop because they sell out locally first.

Long Island Puerh Teas

Where have I been lately, I missed the opening of this shop by puerh collector AllanK. This seller is a boon for shou lovers. I am rather fond of Allan as he shares many traits I have such as too much tea, difficulty parting with any and please don’t visit in person. Probably unbeknownst to you all (and maybe Allan too) he has inspired several of my cartoons over the years, such as this one called Forklift Tea. Now is my turn to thank him for the delightful person he is.

A few years ago, Allan sent round blind tasting samples of his storage to other puerh drinkers. He had two years stored on a tea in three conditions: open storage, plastic wrapped storage, and pumidor storage. Without exception all the puerh drinkers picked out the pumidor storage sample as lively and in good condition. I have had several other samples from Allan over the years, including a memorable 2013 Hai Lang shou brick.

Like other collectors selling tea, I do not expect this new shop to sell the best teas Allan owns. No one wants to part with those. But he has amassed a number of sold out teas, as well as buys from Taobao and he’s selling a few of these. Do some comparison shopping and look for the stuff you cannot find elsewhere. I will be keeping an eye on his shop. Allan tells me he has sold some high sums already to other collectors, and I know he has more to list. Kudos go out to any collector willing parting with some teas, even if to make room for more.

Every tea vendor out there has pluses and minuses. A savvy buyer learns where to buy particular things, and a few lucky people get a deal once in awhile. The best I can say is most vendors will email personally with anyone and work out problems as they arise. Try and use PayPal or some other payment service with a no-hassle refund as a last resort. Have fun shopping!

The Final Fantasy of Buying Puerh

This spring we confront our realities with an armored wallet. While the puerh harvest ahead appears bountiful, according to early reports, prices are headed nowhere but up. I have viewed some pre-order price lists which always show a bit of a discount for people willing to fund a vendor’s season in advance. But if you expect to buy even decent drinker quality puerh this year, your wallet is going to hurt.

The final fantasy of a puerh drinker is expressed on tea chats every day: “how can I buy X tea, or something like it, for the same price or less?” He wants whatever sample or cake he tried last year, but the production is sold out or marked up higher. She hopes Shop Y will offer the same tea as last year, at last year’s prices. Everyone wants a clue from somebody on where to buy some miraculous puerh, preferably for nothing. Oh yes I do have this final fantasy and I am certain if I post it on a tea forum asking people what tea to buy and where, I just might get the perfect answer and no one will laugh!

People ask me if I think we are in a puerh bubble. I do not. In 2007-8 puerh prices took a huge tumble, a bit of history everyone knows. Back then people complained about a 357g beeng costing $30. Now those teas sell for over $100 at half the size. Factory teas are not immune. If you want a spring production, even a 7542 recipe pushes the $50 mark, with Taetea special productions over $100 at retail, if you manage to snag them at all.

The difference between 2008 and today is that we have far more people with lots of money willing to pay even higher prices, and we are nowhere near the ceiling yet. This is partly due to the scarcity of very fine tea, but I think mainly the wealth gap between the top and bottom is so much wider. Wealthy people are richer than ever, and they want puerh. For a wealthy person, what is a few extra hundred dollars, or euros, or marks, or yen or yuan? A few extra thousand? Not much of a dent; such a person probably has those extras in cash and three more large bills from the wallet is not a problem.

Recently I watched some Gold Dayi from a licensed shop fly out of the Malaysian web store, in tongs. People who live paycheck to paycheck could buy tea as a treat back in 2008, now these folks are out of the game of collecting price value. People try and take comfort in the idea that maybe their low end teas will turn into something spectacular through time and storage. A miracle is needed for the teas on the low end to turn into future gold. Expecting affordable teas to appreciate hugely in value, we are living in a fantasy or awaiting a storage miracle. The big difference today is a company like Xiaguan will produce many more tuos now than in the past, such that everyone has them. Lots of lower value summer tea around to press into bitter jincha and meet demand on the low end. You can buy a compressed tea anywhere and even these budget options cost more than ten years ago. But the demand is not the same as for much better tea. Old tuos selling for big bucks now are from a time of smaller productions and bigger nostalgia.

I don’t know about you, but I am mostly priced out of the really fine tea. I hear from a few people who really do possess the funds to keep up. But I hear from far more who do not. The truth is wages are not keeping up with food, rent, utilities and all the other things we need to pay for. More of our paychecks go to basics, leaving less disposable income at the worst possible time when we really need more and more money than ever to buy important things like tea.

Sometimes people suggest buying semi-aged tea. I see fewer and fewer older teas available except for very wet stored or ripe. Most of the semi-aged teas you can buy are the low end, not the high end. The really fine teas are not sold at a bargain basement price. They sell for even more than an average new tea. Disposable income is again a problem if you manage to find a collector willing to part with something good, you need the money up front and fast to have a chance.

My blog is not really about tea reviews, never has been. I enjoy writing about new teas when I have some, but I did not get many teas last year and I expect this year is more of the same. I simply cannot afford to buy all the teas anymore that I once could. Buying a vendor’s entire season for $300 or even $500 is a fantasy now. A single tea costs that much, and my income has not kept up. Even the tea ware I bought a few years ago costs so much more. The vendors who need reviews are new to the selling game, and they are the folks who contact bloggers. Established vendors do not need or even want reviews. Most bloggers who review puerh have invested their own money or rely on samples sent in by readers. A lack of reviews also impacts the budget buyer’s struggle to find “word of mouth” before investing the bit of money she has.

Right now my final fantasy is to keep writing until I drop and my son puts a note on the blog that I am gone. I have not lost hope. I still pretend miracle teas costing less than $10 will show up somewhere and end up in my house without selling the house. For young collectors leaving school and getting started, you will need to find a very lucrative career to fund your tea habit, so choose wisely.

Making Decisions on Buying Tea Ware

Making decisions about tea ware is quite personal and can turn into an obsession rather quickly, whether a person is just starting out or has already built up an obscenely large collection. My recent post on clay kettles brought a number of emails regarding tea ware and other accessories. The vast majority of questions I get can be summed up as:

Should I buy X?

Where X = you name it, everything from Yixing, burners, boilers, to “where did you get that strainer, should I buy one?”

Well, here is my version of the truth summed up as decision-tree type pointers, take it or leave it.

We are alone out there.

No one else can open my wallet and make the decision. No one else can try my water and decide what makes my tea taste the best.

The answer is always No.

This is where to start with any decision-making process regarding tea ware. There is a possible exception in the situation of a Petr Novak club sale, during which we have maybe sixty seconds to decide. Unless one is willing to un-sub from the club emails, then I might as well just click and buy. Get it over with.

A spouse will always say no.

Hopefully you have not pursued this dead end for some time. I suppose if one is truly waffling on a buy, a spouse can tip the scales toward no. At best, a weary indifference means the spouse is unreliable for an objective opinion and we need to ask elsewhere for opinions. Luckily I do not have anyone to object to my purchases that I cannot bully or cajole. These skills are invaluable.

Tea Heads and B/Vloggers are not good to ask.

Most puerh tea collectors already know this. However, a certain obsessive trait usually leads people to continue asking others for advice, even when the buyer’s mind is already made up to go ahead. By exploring this rung of the tea chain I am mostly past the No answer already, and heading toward a Yes. Am I really interested in the opinion, or am I seeking to confirm a decision I have already made? In that case, I might as well skip time-consuming messages for several reasons:

Many tea heads and bloggers have far more tea and tea ware than they really need and another purchase is even less justified. So their initial gut instinct is No. Or maybe they like to buy and need to fortify their shopping defenses against you. No matter the reason, the sheer fact of knowing one has too much already is enough to bias this type of person, and prevent them from objectively considering the item I wish to purchase.

They also are reluctant to suggest spending money to anyone because they do not want to be held responsible for buyer remorse. Or on the flip side, they may actually want the item I plan to buy and could snipe it out from under me. Is this what you want to risk? (By the way, this last bit is the type I am, a proud sniper).

Sellers are worse yet.

This is because the answer is mostly yes rather than no. A rare “no” should be interpreted as a yes in all instances. However, if the seller says “I’ve decided not to sell” and pulls the listing, then I probably missed out because s/he cannot let go of it. In this rare case, I will email and probably phone daily, possibly more often, to try and buy the item or tea.

________________________________________________

Okay, so these are the main methods to get No out of the way. Passing all of these and still obsessing over a purchase means Yes is getting stronger by the minute. So now let us consider what else can go wrong before Yes is finalized. These are "strong stomach tests." We need a strong stomach when purchasing tea ware just as we need one for cheap puerh.

Shipping Breakage

No shipping method is 100% guaranteed against breakage. I think I have had a total of three broken tea ware purchases. Of course some sellers/artists are more reliable than others but no package is bomb proof, there is always a way to completely crush a box.

What Ass sat on your shipping box?
 photo by "alex" of Teafriends
reproduced with permission.

Can you return the item or get a refund? 

Broken tea ware may or may not be eligible for refund, depending on the seller. Sometimes it is not feasible to return tea ware. Earlier this year I bought a very pricey tea pot that had a lid at least 3 mm loose, from a rather famous tea ware artist (no, not Mr. Novak). This unacceptably loose lid was not disclosed in the sales listing. I simply assumed a fine artist of tea ware would not sell such an item. I was wrong.

The cost to return it was over $30 even before adding the necessary extra shipping insurance. The gallery and artist promised to refund the shipping and send a new pot only after I shipped it back. Thus the burden was placed on me to return the item intact. I could no longer afford to waste any more money on the purchase, and eat even more mistakes, so I just kept a gongfu teapot that is honestly not suitable for gongfu brewing.

The crazy part: I had already purchased a tea pot before this one that also had a loose lid. Not a 3 mm loose one, but more like 2 mm loose. Yet again this loose lid was not disclosed on the sale from the private collector. I emailed the collector questioning the non-disclosure. The seller replied that because the item was originally from a known vendor, the vendor reputation sufficed. Turns out the original vendor did not disclose the loose lid either. Wait...because an item is from a reputable seller that gives license not to disclose a flaw? Um…not really.

I could tell I was expected to accept what the collector and the original vendor did not realize is wrong about checking for flaws and disclosing them. “Tight lid” is what you want to see on a gongfu teapot listing, it was not there and I failed to ask, though maybe asking would not get me an answer anyway. So really I was stupid twice.

The opposite situation is with inexpensive tea ware that might cost triple its value to return, so a return actually more expensive than simply keeping the bad item. Ruyao teapots and gaiwans cost around $30, and return shipping is probably about that much. 

Can you stomach any mistake? Fortunately I have a strong stomach and rarely allow mistakes to get in the way of my Buy button.

Yixing Tea Ware

The above now informs my view on Yixing and any other clay tea ware. Most tea heads will tell people not to buy a cheap Yixing teapot for a number of good reasons ranging from poor performance to poor clay, etc. etc. But I say: buy a cheap Yixing or other clay teapot first. Decide whether I want or need Yixing clay before dropping $200+ on a decent one. Buy crap before buying the good stuff. Same thing for tea. I cannot know the difference from bad and good unless I start with the bad.  Also, this logic justifies buying more of the good stuff later on.

Factory 1 vintage new/old stock Yixing

130€ 

photo and listing by Essence of Tea

I have a couple of Yixing tea pots, one for oolong and one for wet puerh. My water really does not require Yixing to add anything to the tea, but the clay is useful for tempering roast or wetter storage. If I lived in a city where the water is of poor quality, I may have a different view.

Tea Kettle Warmers/Burners

A burner heats water in a kettle or keeps a kettle warm after boiling. One can choose between charcoal burners, electric burners, infrared, alcohol and candle style. Does the burner have a cord, and will that electric cord work in my electrical socket? Can I accommodate the cord in my tea area, do I want that cord? If not, an alcohol or candle warmer may be better than an expensive hot plate.

Ovente Infrared burner, eBay
about $24

Charcoal burners are really for outdoor use. If you plan to take tea outside, that is the main reason to use charcoal. If you have little kids around or pets that get into everything, then no on burners. I nod off and forget about kettles on the stove, so I only own a charcoal burner for outdoors.

Cast Iron Kettle

Mostly made in Japan, this type of kettle is popular for tea water. Cheap, readily available rust-free cast iron kettles can be found with enamel coating. Expensive art ware kettles are not lined and one should plan to use it daily to keep rusting at a minimum, and rusting is considered safe in these kettles.

Fine Japanese cast iron kettle
890€
photo and listing by pu-erh.sk

An important fact: the used market has many of both types of kettles, lined and unlined. It is not recommended to buy a used cast iron kettle because it can have cracks the seller may not be aware of, and such kettle may not be safe to use any longer. The only decent resale market is antique value only for certain artists. Thus, a cast iron kettle is a life purchase a person is stuck with it forever. Would I plan to use it daily? Anything less, might as well forget it or buy an enamel lined one for the looks. 

Here is one I have that can be used on any stove to actually heat water. Unfortunately, at $56 the price has doubled since I bought mine a few years ago.

Cast iron enamel lined "Silver Warriors"
$56 (usually includes free tea bags)
photo and listing by enjoyingtea.com

Did I mention cast iron kettles are heavy? Very, very heavy and they get super hot too. Might want to consider steel-toed boots and a decent potholder. I have this cheap kettle solely for the looks and it has an enameled lining. The kettle also holds up well on the charcoal stove, I can simply wipe off any charring.

Silver Tea Ware

These are very pricey products. The resale is nil except for Japanese silver kettles, a person will not get full money back from reselling. Before going ahead with this expensive purchase, try a silver plate creamer as a cha hai from an antique store or eBay first, you can get one for under $10. Next, consider buying a silver cup rather than a teapot or kettle. I have not bought any silver tea ware.

Tiny Teapots

Small is huge among tea ware people. They score high in cuteness but consider your tea, whether it will expand in the pot requiring one to move the leaves to a larger vessel. Perhaps a small gaiwan or shibo is a good way to determine whether you like small size or not before dropping $100  or more on an art piece.

Mini Porcelain Gaiwan 50 ml
$24.99
photo and listing by teaware.house

I know some people who love small pots and also others who now find them gathering dust on shelves. I use small pots exclusively for highly expensive aged sheng, or very potent sheng, teas I may want only a miserly few grams at a time to brew. Otherwise I prefer 100ml or larger.

Tea Tables

Bamboo wood tables will crack eventually and may also get black mildew stains if not allowed to dry. But they are a good way to decide if I like wood before dropping $300+ on a better wood. Ceramic is heavy. Stone is not easily moved around. Trying a Pyrex bowl may help decide how often I like soaking a teapot during my tea ceremony before dumping good money on a table that gathers dust or might crack. I bought a vintage wood tea tray on eBay for $20 and it has inlays too.

Vintage Lacquer Wood Japanese Tray
$22
eBay.com

A good tea table is a life purchase and I have one very good table, but I am glad I had some cheaper tables first to decide what I like for performance and clean up.

Small accessories

Items like strainers, tongs, presentation dishes etc. may well be useful and these are inexpensive and fairly risk-free purchases. Most people will want a puerh pick of some sort. I like replacement wrappers for beengcha.

The Real Truth

The real dope is tea people have virtually no logic at the time of purchasing anything and usually make up decent logic afterward to justify what they bought. While my item is on its way in the mail, I practice the excuses I plan to use when people ask me about tea ware. Try and remember I am a sniper before you email asking me anything. A savvy collector of unique puerh tea and wares will have only a very, very short list of people not to screw over when a valuable purchase is at stake.