Puerh Trends in 2020: Rise of the Zerg

A whole new decade feels like the last century fades farther and farther away. Trends now draw less on the past and more on looking ahead. Climate change continues to affect puerh tea harvest, but up to now dry and cold weather affect the supply of high end tea more than the output of factory tea. Whether climate increasingly affects puerh tea harvests is a factor we drinkers need to watch, but I don't think buying trends are impacted this year by climate fears as much as other issues.

Responsible/Conscious buying

This is probably the biggest trend which I feel will impact puerh buying this year. Aside from people who use puerh as a dietary component, the recreational user is more conscious of purchasing decisions. Responsible buying is a trendy concept in consumer spending in general, but we have a lot of reasons why this idea might hit puerh buyers this year.

How Much is Enough? Blogger Mattcha refers to this in his most recent post. Collecting for the sake of owning kicks in once you have enough to drink and beyond. Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) plays into buying, to some extent, as does the thought of buying what you feel you don't have already. But once you find your way out of FOMO and your collection feels full, continuing to buy feels less responsible.

Storage. Blogger Wilson counsels against the issue of storage and questions whether buyers have what it takes to store puerh successfully. He also questions whether the "newer" style of green puerh will age as traditional factory teas do. He suggests buying 5-8 year old tea, and to me this seems like sensible advice. Storage requires space. Whether you have this kind of space currently, or your partner objects to space given over to tea, storing tea is going to require you to give decades of space and costs. When Responsible conscious buying kicks in, storage emerges as a big reason to halt late night shopping cart purchases.

Wilson's post on storage directly hits at FOMO by suggesting that buyers can pick up some tea in years 5-8 with a good start to storage, so why hurry? While prices do rise on teas with age, money saved on storage costs and space saved might seem worth paying a bit extra for tea a little bit older. I have also noticed that western buying of drinker quality tea from each other in years 5-8 generally is well under retail, unless we are talking about premium or collector value tea. Picking up tea from someone getting rid of stash may actually save money over buying from a vendor. All this feels like responsible buying, and also is a way to combat the fear of missing out because you know that you can find tea easily with a few years of age on it.

Money Toward Other Goals. This is rather self-explanatory and certainly is a factor every year. Especially if you have enough tea.

In general, consumers question whether they really need a purchase and this year I feel people are looking for reasons to buy when faced with many reasons not to. Other factors may play into conscious buying as well.

Rise of the Zerg, the Experiential Casual

Zerg is a gaming term referring to a group of people, maybe noobs, definitely in large numbers, who pursue a single-minded goal, while perhaps forgoing other possible objectives. I think puerh is more mainstream every year, and I expect to see more casuals buying puerh with the idea of having a new experience. This is not the type of person who will buy tongs upon tongs, but who will buy sample bags. The Zerg is a responsible, conscious buyer, of course, who wants to experience puerh and who feels the sample bag is a perfect way to experience a tea. The idea here is a short term experience rather than the long-term-commitment-buying we puerh collectors are well into.

The Zerg will feel they have completely owned the puerh experience through the sample bag without requiring more. This is a difficult idea to counter because the Zerg is convinced they have had a full experience already, as much as the person who bought the full tong. What blogger James at Teadb refers to as stamp collecting is sidestepped by the Zerg who will want to know exactly how they are missing out by not owning and drinking an entire tong when their sample bag suffices. After all, oolong is mostly a small bag experience. But more to the point, one cannot tell someone their taste is less than complete when tea drinking is an aesthetic relative to the individual and no real objective data on tongue experience exists to say otherwise, except as the personal anecdote everyone has. The blogger has less value as an aesthete than as a source of recommending a possible experience.

People decide what they know aesthetically, experience cannot be taught and I'm not sure people want to be "mentored" in tea tasting these days. The Zerg wants to find their own experience, free from the overt influence of others while still requiring the participation of others for recommendations. The Zerg may also have friends reinforcing the new tea experience, making it harder still to argue a casual tasting is anything less than knowledge.

The Zerg is a challenge for the vendor and the blogger. Aside from making more sample bags, I think vendors will need to find reasons why a specific tea is a unique experience worth having to convince the conscious newbie to at least try the tea, as well as convince the already-full collector to buy more. Puerh bloggers tend to go for depth rather than breadth of tea coverage, but this is a good reason more people might start blogging rather than current bloggers rushing to keep up. The Zerg will casually ask "what shall I buy?" and someone needs to have recommendations for that sample bag. But, beyond the recommendation the Zerg is out for the short term experience and I expect to see more and more Zergs because they flow in numbers. Good luck telling them their experience is any less complete than yours.

Puerh Cocktails

Tea is in everything lately, and I expect to see more experimenting with serving puerh with other flavors. A bit of puerh tea in a tall glass with ice, a little alcohol, some flavorings and you have a new drink. Gong fu'ers know that puerh doesn't necessarily taste great after sitting a bit, but one doesn't need much to make a drink and other flavors can completely overwhelm the tea anyway.

Additions to Shou

Last year I suggested that we might see weed in tea, and this year I think we will see more than just chen pi in the shou. We already have the traditional additions of rice, ginseng, chrysanthemum and rose petals, but maybe this is the year to add in chocolate and other flavors for the Zerg looking at new experiences in the local coffee bar. Yes, I said "coffee bar."

People Will Throw out the Wrappers

I think saving wrappers is less a trend, we can always find cool new wrappers to buy.

So these are my thoughts for the new year ahead. I will take a look later on in the year and see if any of these develop or if any new trends emerge. All in good fun, of course.

Puerh Trends: how did we fare in 2019?

Earlier this year I posted a topic called "Puerh Trends We Need to Thrive in 2019." This post exceeded the view count of all my other posts this year by far, and continues to show as one of my top ten posts every week. I am not certain where all this traffic comes from, are puerh drinkers reading this post, or maybe vendors looking for information? Is Google showing this post someplace? I have no idea. But given the amount of attention, I should at least revisit a few of the statements I made as guesses for the year and discuss how the year turned out.

What we need: more $100 and under options.

What we will get: more tiny tongs.

Given the recent frenzy for white2tea's Snoozefest on Black Friday, a sell-out within hours, it seems to me price is as much a factor as tea quality, if not more so. Getting our fix for the least amount of money possible might outweigh saving for a special production. In puerh discussions I see price discussed more often than the specific production. In other words, people ask questions and advice about buying a tea attractive because of the price, rather than because of traits of the specific tea. The identity of the tea might be called letter U, but U is not as important as the cost of U. This sort of observation can lead to a preferences survey and subsequent factor analysis and I'd bet my boots that price is the number one factor to emerge from a potential preferences survey. Here I think the $100 is just a random number I pulled out of my arse and just represents what (gasp) is a low price for puerh these days. This price business is issue number one.

Number two here is whether or not people bought tiny amounts of tea. Based on my observations of social media, this year I saw far more photos of tiny puerh balls and discs containing 10g or less of tea, that is, a single serving of tea. These small puerh servings are not new to market, but they are usually marketed as a convenience item. I wonder though if people are buying these not just as a convenience to storage and drinking, but because they don't want to pay for the full size tea. Again, is price the issue rather than the size?

What we need: more semi-aged teas in vendor shops.

What we will get: more buyer-led group buys.

I am not sure how well this call-out turned out in 2019, personally I don't feel we saw more semi-aged teas offered by vendors this past year. Recently I noticed more white label teas on Yunnan Sourcing. I wonder whether buyers are attracted to the idea of white label teas. Personally some of the best teas I own are white label teas, teas that have little to no provenance but are good or even excellent drinkers. These teas have no collector value, as such, but might generate a temporary word of mouth. I haven't read anything about Yunnan Sourcing's white label teas. But I applaud such options if price is really the main factor driving purchase decisions these days.

At the same time, the group-led buys focused on tea auctions such as those on Facebook or for Taobao buys seem more about getting semi-aged tea again, for the best price, with quality quite variable. Facebook auctions do seem more production-focused than Taobao, on Taiwan productions by reputation with little information on storage but at least the production matters as much as the price. Whereas Taobao is the perennial search for a diamond in the rough with a success rate low enough to discourage the activity for most people after a few tries. 

What we need: teas with body feels.

What we will get: weed in tea, teas with body feels.

This actually happened, I saw a few tea vendors in Portland offering CBD-laced tea. Not quite the same as weed since CBD is not THC, we are getting close to pot tea meaning more than the teapot. My state is not weed-legal so I don't have access to even CBD tea although I can get CBD tinctures. I am not necessarily tempted to add CBD to my tea. I am not sure body feel is really all that important to puerh drinkers even we really should be drinking with our bodies, the concept seemed less important than price was this year. 

What we need: premium shou.

What we will get: premium shou.

Yeah. More people are drinking shou and calling it puerh. Did you notice this in general social media as I did? Shou is all over and I see people posting about shou puerh and I can tell they don't know the difference between cooked and raw, or that sheng even exists. Shou is puerh, and puerh is shou. Shou puerh hit mainstream big time this year...just as a an example, check out Peet's Coffee because yes, they are selling shou puerh as puerh. 

I also noticed western vendors offering even more shou productions, possibly as a response to yet higher prices for raw maocha. Are puerh drinkers drinking more shou this past year? If they ordered more shou from western vendors, this means paying a premium which sort of shoots beyond the price factor theory, because those of us around the block awhile are probably more likely to pick up much less expensive shou from a Chinese factory label than from a western label. 

What we need: affordable sheng.

What we will get: white tea and red tea.

This is 100% true, and add in oolong and other types of tea as well. Here I do think the higher prices for maocha in 2019 led to vendors taking some less expensive maocha and turning out other types of tea to pad the catalog. Or, to put it more nicely, perhaps a puerh vendor turned more general tea vendor. 

The question is whether buyers followed. Did you pick up red tea, white tea or oolong from a puerh vendor this year? I don't count teas like Liu Bao since these are also post-fermented and more likely bought from wholesale rather than vendor-produced, since some of these post-fermented teas are made by factories in areas of China other than Yunnan. I wonder whether buyers followed here or as in the past chose to buy other types of tea from vendors who don't specialize in puerh (such as vendors selling tea from India or Taiwan or some such). I buy a little bit here and there from puerh vendors but the bulk of my non-puerh purchases are from vendors who don't specialize in puerh. 

One reason for why I buy elsewhere is that puerh vendor teas cost quite a bit more. Again, if people are buying more non-puerh teas from puerh vendors this shoots the price theory to shreds. If buyers are truly looking for low prices for puerh, why would they buy hongcha and pay far more from the puerh vendor than elsewhere? Or is it about reaching a free shipping threshold? Or is the non-puerh tea bought from puerh vendors overall so much better? 

(I might be overthinking because I'm facing a sad few weeks ahead as I contemplate a tin of Trader Joe's cinnamon red tea for my tea machine, a gift well overdue for drinking up and I must hold my nose on this one.)

Here is another thought, do you consider yourself a puerh head because you buy non-puerh tea from a puerh vendor? Who the hell is a puerh head today? Does the ordinary puerh head spend as much time drinking other types of tea? Another rabbit hole for another day.

What we need: Taetea collector prices to fall.

What we will get: more Taetea special productions.

Well, I don't think Taetea prices fell this year. I did see more people asking about 7542 and what this sort of puerh tastes like. The entry level for puerh now is not through the 7542 anymore. I can safely say that only a specific type of puerh collector is seriously buying up the numbered productions for collector value. I think we can all agree that if the numbered productions have any value in the future, it will be the rare example that survives storage and we won't see many '88 Qing Bings emerging from the worldwide sales of recipe numbers. I think we have put to bed the idea that buying rough numbered recipes is a financial investment for the future. Special productions are where the money is probably at, and like a used car the special productions by and large don't retain value, they lose value after you buy until and unless they sell out or a few decades pass and a nostalgia factor kicks in. 

The only real value in owning a collection now is having bought for less in the past, as Hster recently suggested. Starting up now costs whiskey-level prices rather than ordinary tea-level prices. People starting up now don't know anything about that 2011 Taetea special production and don't care what the "current value" is. They don't know what a 7542 is much less the century production from that year. Those who have collections should stay in holding because you won't find knowledgeable buyers so much as people just wanting a cheap deal. Or maybe people are just buying to drink rather than hold. I think the collector market is not really in the west anyway and we will never develop real nostalgia for productions of recipes beyond a wedding beeng or some such.

Does any of this hit the mark or not? Obviously I'm working off anecdotes because we don't have real hard data about puerh buyer behavior. We know what prices are but not what goes on in people's heads beyond the cheapest deal for the best tea. If I come up with any thoughts for next year, I will certainly try and post another predictions topic just for fun.

Puerh Trends We Need to Thrive in 2019

2019 promises another busy puerh year for most buyers, judging from the pure frenzy of Black Friday buying last fall. You need to be quick these days when contemplating a purchase, don’t think too long because whatever you’re staring at might be sold out within seconds. Last year’s buying certainly suggests some wishful ideas and perhaps stark reality. Let’s consider some trends we need versus the probable reality.

What we need: more $100 and under options.

What we will get: more tiny tongs.

What I see with these tiny tongs is that nobody actually wants a producer to make these, no one wants tiny tongs as the only affordable option. Yet when I look at social media and see pics of puerh hauls, the tiny tongs are everywhere. People tack them on to a purchase of something else, and honestly half the time the tiny tongs are not the main buying plan. But vendors benefit here, and they have smaller quantities of nice tea that will not fill out a full size production, so why not make minis when they sell well?

What we need: more semi-aged teas in vendor shops.

What we will get: more buyer-led group buys.

The fact is, semi-aged tea is barely worth the time of a profit vendor to scout out and sell. The profit margin just isn’t there. Any good tea is still pricey enough wholesale. Anyone who has a good tea usually knows what they have. So the vendor is not getting a decent enough steal to make the same margin as with newer, young tea. More and more people are going to rely on tea heads to middleman scout on Taobao and elsewhere. Still plenty of space for LP buys, Teas We Like, An Adventure in Every Cup etc. to bring semi-aged teas to buyers. The market is there, but the profits generally are not, the middleman does it for love.

What we need: teas with body feels.

What we will get: weed in tea, teas with body feels.

I think the goosh-only phase got a dose of reality over the past few years. Gushu gets slapped on a lot of teas that aren’t, and gushu doesn’t necessarily mean ethereal level tea anymore even when genuine. So much overpicking going on, and too few truly pristine, untouched tea areas accessible to any of us. We do have an abundance of cheap weed, according to a recent Vice report, Oregon is awash in cheap weed because of issuing a license to just about anybody wanting to grow. The next logical step is add that cheap weed to tea and amp up the tea crowd and the weed crowd. I wonder how many people would even notice bits of crumbled weed in a beengcha.

Having said that, I think vendors will deliver on the body feels even without the weed. White2tea certainly delivered in 2018 in Feng Qing Arbor Red and White, and for a price point under $100 such that you can buy your puerh and get your body feels too.

What we need: premium shou.

What we will get: premium shou.

Over the past few years we saw a few vendors hitting shops with 40 cents/g and up for tippy, premium shou tea. People like premium, they like clean shou and are willing to pay. While premium, gift quality shou has been around forever in China, western buyers are probably more receptive to western vendors due to cleanliness notions, meaning no funky off-flavors, no storage odors or flavors, tiny tippy leaves. Maybe premium shou will get downsized into tiny tongs rather than upsized, but the buyers are there for clean and pricey shou. Unlike sheng, shou is consumed quickly by comparison leaving the buyer hunting for refills. I think vendors are going to deliver on this trend.

What we need: affordable sheng.

What we will get: white tea and red tea.

I see these teas flying off shelves in part because they are beginner friendly in profile. White and red teas are also ways to sell less expensive maocha. Vendors are delivering on this trend and with pretty wrappers. I expect a lot more Yunnan whites and reds this year. I doubt maocha prices for the good sheng puerh teas will improve much, unless we have such an awful weather year the quality is poor. 

What we need: Taetea collector prices to fall.

What we will get: more Taetea special productions.

The reason behind the price flurries of recent years is the real estate market in China has taken a bit of a nosedive. Real estate is one of the few investments middle class persons have for their cash. Collectibles pick up a bit when real estate falls, such as tea which can be unloaded quickly by comparison with real estate. I don’t know if the price will fall in the collector tea area this year, especially if real estate stays flat and currency flattens more. I am seeing more tongs up for trade though on Facebook, maybe people are getting nervous. 

In any collector market, a situation where everyone crazes over too many productions, eventually the best and most desirable bear the price falls of less desirable items. In order for the cream to rise to the top, the low end needs to drop out. Taetea has too many productions starting retail at over $100/beeng, and like used cars  leaving the dealer lot, the price drops to half in retail price cutting. The market gets confusing as to which productions are really worth not only their starting retail, but perhaps more as the run sells out. Right now we are in the midst of this confusion, and perhaps this is the year when we start to see a real distinction of low end from high end. Honestly, a lot of these beengs are the same old chopped tea with very little to distinguish one from another aside from the wrapper design.

I would be very, very wary of jumping into collector beengs that are not part of a drinking plan. Taetea is surely still on the boutique tea upswing, we will likely see more special productions starting in the over $100/beeng retail range as long as people continue to buy like crazy.

What we need: few predictions and more tea reality.

What we will get: more speculation.

You can count on this one.

When Tea Gets Ugly, and other 2018 Puerh Predictions.

The online tea world just gets nastier every year. I look back to a couple of years ago and the conflicts in the puerh world seem warm and fuzzy by comparison to what is going on lately. We are well past the point now of joking over 1800 year old tea and all the great things puerh will do for your diabetes. What is new is a consumer backlash, in my opinion. This backlash has a number of elements, some of which have more to do with the consumer than with tea or tea vendors. The biggest factors in play right now are: 1) shift in marketing preferences by consumers; 2) increase in puerh tea prices, coupled with 3) continuing stagnant purchasing power of consumers.

Marketing Shift

For the past decade or more, tea marketing has focused on health/wellness side of tea drinking in hopes of converting coffee drinkers and selling a lifestyle image. Largely this wellness marketing focus has aimed for and appealed to financially well-off persons over the age of forty. These people are primarily responsible for the success of gyms, spas, and high tech devices. Aging always drives spending money in staying healthy and youthful, and lines the pockets of wellness gurus worldwide. Now we have a younger buying cohort who is not yet preoccupied with aging, and has less purchasing power per person and prefers lower tech living. Consequently we see gyms on the decline, and high priced tea brewing devices fail.

Along with this, the wellness marketing trope feels tired. It smacks of privilege not felt, along the lines of wishful thinking rather than reality. The consumer is aware that tea with a Zen lifestyle is not provided by hard working, benevolent vendors. These are experiences consumers create for themselves. Tea is an ingredient of experience in the daily actions of the buyer, but not the entire experience bought in one huge package.

With a more “ingredient,” nuts and bolts focus, people are impatient when they feel someone is trying to sell them an image or lifestyle when really the purchase is tea. I consistently read consumer complaints over marketing which includes “image” based tea labels, with no real information on the actual tea. This scheme is all the more obvious when accompanied with tea photos taken from a wholesaler stock catalog and the consumer recognizes the repeated usage from one vendor to another. 

The term I see more and more on tea forums is “marketing schtick.” Consumer backlash is increasing against teas sold via images or lifestyles, rather than a description of what the product is, “objectively,” origins and so forth. Consumer discussions continue for months along these lines, for example the Mei Leaf 1000 year tea discussion on Steepster. Consumers also see through the schtick of vendors who “name drop” on labels, naming conventions like “Little Bingdao” on teas that are about as close to Bingdao as Milwaukee is to Chicago. 

Online discussions stemming from a "disconnect" between vendors and consumers now get really ugly. An example of the worst might be one about a monthly tea subscription company selling lifestyle when the teas do not measure up to expectation, and consumers taking to social media to complain, resulting in threats by the vendor to sue. Even bloggers are starting to hear threats of lawsuits for negative reviews of teas, an unlikely scenario but certainly not pleasant tea meditation. Another ugly discussion continued for days over the alt online names of a tea vendor presumably anonymously self-promoting teas and bashing the competition.

All the disillusioned discussions online point to a decline or shift in social marketing of tea, with too many tea companies using social media in the exact same way. Too many tea companies focusing on image, lifestyle or boasting a guru lead inevitably to consumer weariness, whether via photos, blogs or podcasts. Tea marketing is in a sort of reductionist phase, the thing rather than the image of the thing. But we have a few more factors at play in 2018, the picture is not quite so simplistic.

Increase in (Puerh) Tea Prices

Tea is more expensive in large part because more people are demanding a premium product, and the amount of premium tea available cannot possibly meet the demand. In addition, weather plays a role in how much premium tea is available in a given year, and the past few years were affected by unusual climate events. Governmental policies such as in Taiwan have made high mountain oolong more scarce as well.

In the past four years the cost of a nice puerh tea has literally doubled, and that is not including the increases in puerh tea costs before or even after the big bubble of 2008. Ghastly price increases are coming at a bad time too, because on the one hand long-time collectors have plenty of tea and are not likely to open the wallet except for increasingly rare tea experiences, and people new to collecting are priced out before they even start. Over the past year, one of my blog posts has consistently remained in my top six “most read” posts, the post called “How Can I Afford this Hobby?”  I suspect that the people finding this post are new to puerh. They are dealing with sticker shock and want recommendations. The same can be said about oolong and many other premium teas as well. Buying premium tea is increasingly out of reach for most of us, myself included. We can still find decent budget teas, as I wrote about in that post, but decent is not the same as premium.

Continued Stagnant Purchasing Power

Premium tea was once an affordable treat, but while teas are increasing in price and scarcity, the consumer is ever more aware of how little their money buys. Crypto currency is a huge topic right now, in part because people are frustrated with how little cash they have and how little their cash can buy. I think this is the real anger in the ugliness of the tea scene. How dare vendors pitch “schtick,” lie about tea, sell lifestyle tropes, mark up prices more than 10% a year, use social marketing to find customers when the reality on the ground of the consumer is so damned painful?

Along with this pain is the realization that change is not going to happen anytime soon. The whole notion of “change” is political, and politics are more stagnant than a wet pile of shou. Consumer anger peaked over the past year or so and now people are onto what they hope are solutions, whether it is crypto currency or changing buying habits. I propose a few concepts that will be key in this year’s puerh buying.

Budget

Budget teas rumored to have good quality will sell out quick. Yes, they always sell out quick but we have more buyers now than four years ago. More people are seriously looking for decent budget teas. The high end collector side is likely to remain stable with a few people able to afford the best of the best. I believe the successful vendor to the western market will either focus on the budget end or scale back significantly and cater to a small group of high end collectors. The middle tiers will be slower to sell, especially and unless “better” drinkers are vastly different year after year, which for the most part they are not, so the middle may be the most stable price-wise, and perhaps the toughest sell.

Chinese Factory Teas

Western ignorance of the Chinese language and myths about Chinese politics favor factory teas more this year, with budget so much of a factor. People cannot read the wrappers, so they are essentially “empty” of marketing imagery for the western buyer. Even if the wrappers are all about the tired health and wellness tropes, people cannot read them. Even if the wrappers lie, anyone who cannot read Chinese will not know.

More importantly, Chinese puerh wrappers have the nostalgia factor politically. They project the old-time state owned factories with emotionless number recipes. The bland sameness of the old CNNP label suggests a society with no elites, when premium tea and bad tea shared the same wrapping. Now of course the old reality had elites, despite the “worker” philosophy. But for a customer with stagnant purchasing power, abandoned by the state, left to the mercy of corporations, essentially the customer in “capitalist” countries, a factory wrapper suggests a political change that needs to happen even if it does not. Chinese wrappers simply do not push the sore buttons, and one can find a lot of budget-friendly factory teas for under $50, full-size cakes too, not these bottle-cap sizes that we see more and more of.

More Auctions and Group Buys

The middleman is not responsible for the mess, and may carry an advantage of coordinating budget-friendly group tea buying. Personally I see this as an expensive way to buy tea in the long run, but in the short term might be the only option for folks who hope their current budget will change for the better in a few years.

Along with this, more and more people buying tea means more tuition tea, not merely bad tea. People need time to learn what they like in tea, and so the secondary market is not yet kicked in as much as it will be in a few years. More people will decide to sell teas they do not like in order to buy other teas. Right now this has not yet really started in the west, but it will and maybe 2018 is the year it really starts to increase. I bought some very good tea last year this way, and sold a few I knew I would never drink.

More Interest in Storage

Tea storage is rather low tech, as inexpensive as you like. I believe this is the real meat of the puerh hobby, and obsessing over storage rather than shopping is the healthy direction our hobby needs to go. I see more and more discussions of storage than ever before, and the ideas are grand. I applaud the failures too, because we learn more from failure in the short term than anything else. Long term storage is still anyone’s potential success story. I see far more marketing potential in storage than in lifestyle or wellness. Unfortunately I think the tea vendor world will continue marching along with the tired lifestyle stuff rather than stock up on storage solutions and custom thermoses.

Overall, I think 2018 is the year of the Testy Customer and I will be interested to see what emerges from this on the vendor end. Of course these are merely my own observations and predictions. Anything can happen and probably will.

Happy drinking!

The Raw and the Cooked: 2017 Puerh Predictions

Last year I enjoyed writing an article about puerh season predictions. Some of them came true. So this year I assembled a few more, just for the fun of speculating off the top of my head. After all, my tea hobby is mostly speculation, brewing and stewing anyway. 

2017 is a Rooster.

The other word doesn’t work in English without tittering unless you want to use the word beenghole or Bacon Log in the same sentence. We are barely a month out of Chinese New Year and the jokes are old already. I am loving 2018 Dog right about now.

The Trees are one year older.

This means adding 100 years in retail marketing. With evidence too, so we expect more photos of trees full of leaves no one is allowed to pick, and plenty of grandmas willing to swear on their betel leaf that those trees were around before the flood. Likewise, I am fairly certain my Dear Son will happily testify under oath that my tea collection is ten years older than it really is. He can probably find a Tea Sommelier to certify stamp a piece of paper for him for $50 or less, a small fee to pay to add thousands of dollars to the worth of my collection. Business is booming all around the tea industry, and I haven’t a thing to wear.

The Tea Harvest will Happen.

Yes, the forecast is optimistic we will have new tea this year.

The Great Shrinking gets dodgier.

Last year we started seeing more and more 100g and even smaller beengcha, with better material than in the past. I continue to see these small cakes as dodgy buys at best. While this small cake might be an opportunity to taste a higher quality of tea in a very few cases (and I mean few), it’s not a good size for future hoarding. To clarify, I’m not here to represent the sensible buyer and most readers of this blog know that by now.

We want as much good tea as possible. I see the 100g and smaller cake size as a trial size for people who are new to puerh and don’t know what they are getting into. Otherwise, why would I want a cake of maybe 12 sessions? If the tea is good, then I regret the small size and want more. A good eighth will flake off a cake in normal conditions anyway, especially when the wrapper gives out which we all know it will. If I want a sample, I will order a sample and it arrives in a bag.

Also, small cakes are clutter in the storage. Forget your nice stacks of 357s, the small ones fall all over in a messy way. I feel like buying a reliable 357g every year such as a good old boring Menghai is a better move in the long run than futzing with tiny cakes until you grow weary, and drink them up quickly just to be done with the tediousness of caring for that small size. Keep in mind tea vendors are thinking about selling tea, and this is why they make these small sizes. We buyers are storing, and for storage and long term relationships with our tea cakes, the bigger size wins for my investment.

Somebody will invent the Pumidor.

Old fridges and unplugged wine coolers are reaching a social peak, and yet anxiety abounds amongst tea heads huddled over hygrometers showing >1 SD variability in humidity levels. This situation is ripe for the next huckster to crowd fund the perfect puerh storage cabinet to bilk worried collectors out of the price of a premium tong. Barring that, we have an opening in the western puerh market for Florida homesteaders to rent a warehouse and start charging for long distance storage. This could unleash yet more market opportunities for things like chartered flights to visit their Pu and blocks of hotel rooms serving continental breakfast boba. I can’t wait.

Someone else will discover Bug Shit tea.

Yet another blog post waiting to happen and you know it’s inevitable. Funny how we never seem to see consistent reviews year after year by the same blogger of this season’s new BS tea, with nuances in flavor and such.

The term Boutique will lose all meaning.

So, what exactly is “boutique” nowadays? Does Chen Yuan Hao qualify as boutique? After all, it is a brand sourced by a single entity. For some, “boutique” means northern tea, or what gets called “oolong” tea which presumes that tea cakes made by small entities won’t age, even though none of the so-called “boutiques” have existed even ten years at this point. To others, “boutique” refers to (mostly) white people traveling to Yunnan to make tea cakes. Oddly too many of those making such a proclamation about aging have not even tried the teas fresh or aged.

I don’t know about you, but I see small buyers/producers of puerh tea coming and going from the retail scene, maybe more coming in than going out. But not enough time has elapsed anywhere to determine which teas will age into anything good. We are talking 10-20 years here, and that presumes such tea will even survive the storage years, either getting wrecked or drunk up by the owner well before any Judgment Day arrives. As for wrecking in storage, at this point I know several people storing tea longer than five years in the west, people who own both “boutique” and factory teas and I will bet money their tea survives quite nicely. I am not counting myself in that handful of people either. I plan to drink up or wreck mine. Anything left will be placed next to my urn in an unmarked location.

Despite all that, Social Media will break into all-out war over Factory vs. Boutique.

More than a few grumblings and rumblings are poking themselves into my blog comment section lately, and louder still around the forums. Right now, Factory is winning. I don’t know if factory tea is really and truly better or if this reflects a desire for aged tea, and we just don’t have any aged house tea from small boutique producers. I was surprised last year at a tea tasting when alongside some truly fine new teas, the group vote overwhelmingly chose an aged factory tea as the best one served that day. I do not know if this was simply a preference for aged tea over fresh. But the new teas were far and away super premium leaf, unspoiled by poor processing and yet most folks wanted the grungy old cake that had no real depth of character except for the fact that it was fifteen years old.

So in lacking other aged alternatives people buy older factory teas, paying huge mortgage-sized sums in a few cases, putting up with very wet storage and retired smoke. On some level, the flavors in older factory teas are what people are accustomed to. On the other hand, some older teas do pack a punch and I respect the stomach enough to know that aged teas are better to drink. I hope that we don’t always need to settle for dusty old brick simply because it’s aged, or pay out the child’s college fund merely to drink decent aged tea.

I also hope that as people get more heated in debates over tea preferences, we remember to respect the drink of our fellow men and women. In the remains of a long day we all need our tea, and punching someone’s enjoyment steals peace from the tea table. Disrupting the tea table is the bigger faux pas, and a huge rudeness in the end. The reality is in a moment of thirst we all will gladly drink that dusty old brick if it’s the only thing we have rather than a jasmine oolong, though I suspect many of us might quaff the oolong too. After all nobody is going back to coffee.

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To wit, the “Taobao Tea Melee.”

Tea heads are not the only ones duking it out. I rejoiced to see this headline in translation on puer.cn. I envision Taobao store owners engaging in hand to hand combat with girls in candy colored swimsuits walking around with numbered placards for each round, and clowns flinging puerh discs like Frisbees to eager outstretched hands. It’s about time puerh tea gets more fun because really the whole scene is far too serious.

Actually, the article is referring to the quick buck made by Taobao sellers of fake old tea, mostly “wet warehouse” designed to jump-age the tea artificially. The author points out that people are fooled once, maybe twice, but eventually customers catch on to the game. He advocates for “small profit” tea selling of the genuine brand. I like that, but it’s a pipe dream. What I really glean from these articles and around the net is a continuing down trend of highly wet stored tea in the consumer palate. A bit of humidity is good for buyers in the west, but more than 3-5 years humid storage is a risky buy, whether on Taobao or anywhere else. Stick to dry unless you are certain you like overcooked tea.

Yunnan Sourcing will make a Jinggu cake.

In a tea world of such contention and climate change, some things in the puerh tea world are reassuringly reliable. As my post here goes to press, Yunnan Sourcing has announced they will be rolling out a new website format in the next few weeks. Apparently the old site is straining under an antiquated architecture. I glanced at the new site, and the look is quite different. I am sure the new site will be serviceable, but I will miss the reassuring feeling of tea shopping with the gold and red colors of the old site. I want to thank Scott Wilson for giving us so many wonderful years with the former site, and I look forward to testing the new one.

Well, now you have my predictions. Do you have any predictions for this year?

Budget, Black Friday and the Tea Shopping Forecast

Here is my shopping forecast for the remainder of 2017. I wish the news is better, but it’s looking dire out there.

The cakes are getting even smaller, people.

You’d have to live under a rock to avoid the Great Shrinking. Down from 500g to 400g to 357g to 250g and then 200g. Now we are at 100g cakes. Yes, ma’am nearly every tea vendor has a 100g, check Bitterleaf, Misty Peaks, Denong Tea,white2tea, Crimson Lotus. While white2tea’s Treachery, Bitterleaf’s WMD Mansa at $88/100g teas are pricey, now we have Denong Bulang at $97/100g and Wymm Tea…well never mind you get the idea.

And then there are the small squares which have of course been around awhile at places like Taetea, but not at these prices we are seeing on top shelf tea named after cats or dogs. White, black and puerh teas are shrunk from turkey platter size down to teacup saucers. Tiny teacup saucers. You can bet your sweet caffeinated arse that we will be getting tea balls soon for $30.

The bottom line reality is that high end puerh tea costs go up every year, not down. Top quality tea you want to own is exempt from tea market bubbles. Not enough top tier tea exists for the prices to fall. More demand every year and less tea to satiate. Actually, there is a lot of tea around, just not the really fine stuff. I expect more sticks for the money and I can always buy charred medicine chop, but I just can’t drink that stuff anymore. So, buying the really good shit takes three hand jobs at the truck stop instead of just one, and I ain’t getting any younger.

I know tea bloggers have bitched for years about the prices, “I won’t pay more than $8 a cake they are charging $36 for.” Today we can just add another zero onto those numbers for the same gripe. The only upside to all this is I think the leaf we can get today is far superior, as is the processing. I will give the boutique vendors a huge amount of credit for upping the overall quality of what we are buying, assuming of course you want to pay the asking price. Teas are regularly selling out which suggests that yes people want the good stuff and they will pay.

We also have more mainstream people entering the buying experience who don’t want the commitment of storing puerh tea. Maybe they aren’t even sure they like puerh tea. Buying small, like 100g, is a way to give it a convenient college try. That’s yet another reason why I expect $30 tea balls. Someone will put top shelf tea into a single session for even less commitment, in just a matter of time.

More people loving their factory tea.

This is inevitable. Nobody wants to hear otherwise. Yes, truth is relative.

Online tea sites will continue to have annoying landing pages.

Why do tea vendors think a landing page with a photo, or worse a video is the best way to sell me lots of tea? They don’t seem to realize I might need to shop with a level of frantic anxiety on my phone. Zhentea.ca has a single tea on a landing page that I must click on in order to get to anything remotely resembling a menu. Bitterleaf Teas has a landing page, but when I click on teas I get a new page of meaningless symbols which are supposed to represent different puerh cakes. I was aghast when white2tea added a new landing page with a rain coat I can’t even buy, and then the sheng puerh can only be viewed by year rather than the option to see the whole raw lot. Wymm Tea…well never mind, you get the point.

These fancy sites share a design trend of the buying experience starting on a minimum of the third page we click on. Annoying landing pages mean that I will get busted at work for tea shopping on company time. Or the baby starts crying, or the kitten tears into the curtains and my data allowance is gone before I purchase anything. By the time I get to filling up a doom cart some guy from Taiwan with a mega wallet will buy it all up. I don’t want tea vendor hallucinatory design visions, I want the actual goods.

Sorry to direct you to a classic, but look at Yunnan Sourcing. Or even Chawangshop. I get a quick view of any new products, a helpful menu of links on the landing page that go directly to the tea I need, and a search box at the top. By the time I get to three pages I’ve viewed at least one tea I sought out for myself with reviews in three or more languages. Yunnan Sourcing will load on any browser including my clamshell phone which doesn’t have internet.

I need a landing page that goes directly to the tea I want to buy. I need a page called New Products or the option to sort Newly Listed.  If I can’t load your site in a war zone, we have a problem. Fix this shit now.

More opaque wrappers with questionable inks.

I’m seeing more thick paper that can’t possibly let in moisture. And I really wonder about all the inks, are they food grade? Maybe we need to start talking about removing the wrapper and storing it somewhere else. I don’t know about you but I’m seeing some bleed in my storage that isn’t the tea.

Puerh Tea Collectors eschew child bearing.

With tea prices skyrocketing, children are simply un-affordable now. I can buy a decent drinker for the price of a box of Pampers, and sheesh the buggers keep on costing and costing and costing. I know parents of young ones have plenty to grip about, but I have some bad news for you all. I’m still not rid of my grown one who expects me to pay the full utility bill every month and never buys me any tea whatsoever.

Nowadays you need to figure on the kid costing you well past the drinking age. You are bleeding out until he’s age thirty or over. This is how long you will wait before you can buy any tea. No good reason to pay for actual children when I can PayPal Tea Urchin instead. Forget that snuggly warm queen bed this winter and invest in single beds and preferably separate rooms if you hope to afford any tea in the future.

On Black Friday and 11/11, no vendor will have an actual sale.

Prove me wrong, please.

2016 Spring Puerh News

Spring tea continues to dribble in slowly to online vendors. I recently got a couple of samples of early spring offerings by Chawangshop along with an order of other teas. Chawangshop put a warning on their Instagram about a month ago, telling followers to “stop asking” about spring teas, that they would be released later in the summer. I surmise that the few new teas on offer thus far are not representative of the rest of the collection yet to come.

I’m feeling a bit less enthusiasm this year for diving into Chawangshop’s spring collection, and not because of the teas themselves. In fact, I found last year’s offerings quite lovely, especially the 2015 Hekai cake and the bitter age-r Mengsong. Chawangshop straddles the low/middle price point extremely well for unpretentious daily drinker teas, especially when each tea is really unique from the others, and often single origin. But their social media comments are a real turn-off lately. Along with the exasperated-sounding comment on IG telling people to stop asking about spring tea release dates, Chawangshop posted a bit of a scold on Facebook to people for drinking their teas now rather than storing them. A year ago a comment appeared on a blogger site from the same vendor criticizing western buyers for purchasing samples rather than whole tongs, and for judging teas from samples rather than drinking a full cake. Okay, then why send samples? Does the vendor not want people to try and buy? Maybe the comments are not meant as critical as they sound, especially if one credits the speaker whose English may be a second language. But still, if you are peddling huang pian, I wonder how much a vendor can afford to insult the customer, when it is nobody’s business what someone does with their purchase.

Spring Tea samples by Chawangshop

This first offering is a 2016 Manzhuan “gushu” huang pian, on sale now. I do like Manzhuan tea, which tends to have a sweetish Yiwu profile, but with a bit more bitter strength. Notably, white2tea’s 2014 Manzhuan is a prized tea in my collection, and I’m currently failing at my effort to store and save this tea. I keep dipping into it a couple times a year. So I’m inclined to view Manzhuan huang pian a bit more favorably. Because these 2016 teas are still rather new and wet, I took only 3g from my sample to try now, and will try the remaining tea later in the year.

At left, Manzhuan "gushu huangpian, on right, Myanmar Jingdong

This tea requires fairly lengthy steep times to get started. The leaves are greener than expected, and of course I don’t see any buds or small leaves as this is not premium leaf. I used 40-50ml of water and still got a fairly light cup. Again, the tea is rather fresh and may not be as concentrated now as might be in another six months. The profile is floral and fruity, a bit of teeth cleaning astringency and very lightly bitter. Pleasant enough tea that lingers in the mouth, died out in about 6 steeps. I noticed a bit of buzzing in my face from this tea, and it is worth revisiting later in the year, especially at $15 for a 200g cake, might be worth tossing one into my cart along with some heicha.

Fourth steep of the Manzhuan huangpian. I spilled the third on my chest.

Next up 3g of 2016 Myanmar Jingdong Xiao Bing Cha. Not rightly to be called puerh, this is a border tea from just outside Yunnan. I think most of us are aware that tea trees do not know borders, but of course tea from outside Yunnan will not claim the same high price. This tea brews up a much stronger cup than the previous huangpian, because we have the full range of leaf here. The tea is lightly bitter and astringent, with fruity qualities, a bit of minty-ness. Lingers much less in the mouth than the Manzhuan, and this tea is also very green. Right now this tea is literally just green tea, and has not yet coalesced into an enzymatic puerh-like tea cake. Like its partner above, this tea deserves another try later in the year, and at $12 a cake not much of a sacrifice on the wallet.

Third steep, Myanmar Jingdong brews up greenish because it's new

The tea surely grabbing the most attention right now from puerh heads is the new 2016 collection from White2Tea. You’d have to be living under a rock to not have noted the new teas. I’ve ordered a few already and will try and cover them soon. And I got a chance to ask TwoDog about the controversial “Storytelling” cake selling at $369 for only 200g.

“I don’t care if I sell it,” said TwoDog. “Anybody who buys this tea will either understand it, or aspire to understand it…It’s a tea that if nobody bought one gram, and I had the rest to myself until I shuffle off this mortal coil, I wouldn’t care one fucking bit.”

You can obsess over that now…

But the real headlines this week must also include the new tea store opened by longtime blogger Wilson, http://adventureineverycup.com. I about fainted dead away when I saw Wilson’s announcement today, what a shock when a puerh hoarder opens a shop to sell his stash! And many of his prices are on the low-ish side. Wilson’s tea travels are puerporn at its best, because he goes to the actual factories to buy his tea on vacation jaunts. He lives in Singapore, so his tea is stored in a hot and humid climate, and I can be sure that his teas are well taken care of. Offerings include aged CNNP and pre-2011 Dayi. He is even selling excess tea ware, including an unused 1980s Factory 1 Yixing pot with the sticker AND the box! So this means you better get over there. Quick.

Cwyn