Yunnan Sourcing 2014 Autumn Bingdao

2014 Autumn Bingdao by Yunnan Sourcing

I bought this tea back in the good old days of 2018 when puerh was cheaper and I really really really had hopes that Yunnan Sourcing would open their drive-thru puerh restaurant I had every reason to believe in.  Just think if Yunnan Sourcing had followed through and built that drive-thru, what with this pandemic now the puerh tea business would be boom times. By now their Drive-Thru Gong-Fu would be fully franchised with a location in my home town for my convenience. I am so very weary of the pandemic, but even more weary of pour after pour after pour burning my fingers and spilling tea everywhere. Doing my own gongfu really is a first world problem I fully believed Trump would have solved before leaving office. Just goes to show how brainwashed I am by social media, politicians and tea shopping. Well today is a new day and I reluctantly return to dealing with my own wrappers on teas I have not yet tried and puerh prices higher no matter who your government is. 

To wit, when I bought this tea back in 2018, this 2014 Autumn Bingdao 400g Whopper cost only $92 on the US site. I had over 3000 Loyalty points to spend which knocked off a further $30, leaving me with a total cost of $62. Today the same tea costs $157 on the US site and just a few dollars less on the .com. At the time I had a plan to compare this particular tea with a more recent spring version. The prices for the spring release of the same tea in 2018 had ballooned well over $200 by 2018 and now it's over $300. But then the 2019 and 2020 spring releases shrunk in size to 250g and 200g respectively. The price per gram of the spring offering hasn't decreased any, but the price of entry is a bit lower as of last year, and one can always get a sample if you cannot afford the full spring beeng. 

On the other hand, the more recent Autumn Bingdaos right now are all within $5 or so of the 2014 and still are the same 400g size. So for this autumn tea the price has not gone up at all really. I guess the market action is concentrated on the spring release. The tea is from a single origin around the Bingdao old village area, not the super expensive new village and the trees used are younger than the more famous old trees in the region. 

My plan of doing some comparisons by year hit a snag when this 2014 Autumn tea arrived back in August 2018. I opened the wrapper and to my chagrin the beeng was bright green. It had virtually no signs of aging, despite the fact that it was already 4 years old. At the very least I expected to see some early oxidation which is common in the first couple of years after pressing. I had no idea how long this tea might have been stored in Oregon. 

My winter light outdoors is a little bluish,
and I did not filter the photos to compensate.

I could not go ahead and write about this tea until I took time to see if it had some processing issues or if it would ferment properly. I decided to remain optimistic that it was an Oregon-storage-middle-of-the-tong situation. Because it was August at the time, I left the beeng out on the three-season porch to take advantage of the summer heat and humidity, and as I recall I left it out there for five weeks or so before moving it to crock storage. Now here we are 2 1/2 years later and it's time to try this tea. 

Looking at the beeng it is definitely still green-ish, but is definitely not as green as it was, which is a bit of a relief. Although it's not really a huge deal either way since it only cost me $62, which I realize is a full tea budget for some folks but is pocket change for the crazy amounts I spend on puerh tea. I chipped off 12g and decided to leaf heavy with 100 ml of water gongfu. Now if I had that drive-thru I surely could have the perfect brew instead of the lazy one I now embarked on.

The tea opens with a beautiful floral and cotton candy bouquet on the nose, with a bit of dried grass underneath and bark-like stems. An autumn puerh tends to be a little bit longer in the leaf with more stem, but the leaves actually are on the smaller side. Overall I enjoy the floral and white grape notes, with a bit of warm pepper and turmeric underneath, that autumn spice that honestly I probably would miss had I not known ahead of time this is a fall tea. 

Steep 2

My over-leafing starts to punish me on third brew with increasing bitterness and some drying. I notice the color of the soup is not quite as bright yellow as the photo on the tea listing at Yunnan Sourcing, mine is darker golden. So hopefully this is a sign of the oxidation I can see on the dry tea. I finally start to see that brighter yellow color more around steep 7. In the meantime steeps 4-6 are extremely bitter, but not painfully so. I normally don't regret over-leafing, but in this case with a lovely floral tea like this I'm doing an injustice to these higher notes by pounding my tongue with bitterness. Qi is rather mild, just a bit of buzzing around my ears and slightly relaxing. Really I am bombarding my palate, and next time I will go more like 7-8g per 100ml. I can feel the tea in my throat and stomach and make it through about 6 steeps before stopping for the day.

I was unable to continue the session the following day, and resumed the day after that. The tea steeps up nicely with the floral and grape profile and a bit less bitter than before. I am still mainly flash steeping around 9 steepings when I finally need to add 20 seconds or so. When you over-leaf like this a tea goes for many more steepings than when using a lower tea/water ratio. But now the soup is a bit cloudy from the wet leaves sitting in the gaiwan for two days.

Steep 7

Overall the tea really is quite pleasant. The flavor profile is not terribly complex, just a straight up floral and grape with a bit of green-y spiciness early on. I'm reminded of some of the white2tea house teas, which probably share a similar northern origin though probably not the same village, as Yunnan Sourcing seems to have a single farmer for this production. 

The tea has a somewhat singular profile and I can imagine it would benefit from blending. At the same time, here is an opportunity to try an unblended Bingdao-area tea for a reasonable price. The older trees are well beyond the reach of any western vendor, so if you see Bingdao! Bingdao! hollered elsewhere, approach with skepticism all around. 

I feel like my 2014 beeng here is a few years behind where it should be in terms of aging. I do not feel my storage was able to "catch up" the tea. Looking at the leaves, they are processed perfectly with no signs of redness or overcooking. The issue really is likely a middle-of-the-tong combined with dry storing. I believe it will continue to age, but it will be very very slow. I think it will do better in a higher heat situation, but of course the risk is losing the lovely florals. 

On the plus side, if anyone is concerned about the early storage of the 2014 in the US, the solution is to buy a younger beeng of this same tea. There is no financial disincentive in doing so, for the autumn version only has a couple dollars price difference off the 2014. The US and regular YS website have only small price differences between them, but the shipping (free in the US) will cost far more from China. Very worth a sample to try Yunnan Sourcing's Bingdao teas, if only to familiarize yourself with the profile. I am not sure we will continue to have such an opportunity with issues like the environment, prices and politics which all could affect our chances of obtaining teas like this in the future. 

The Wellness Tea, Herbal Tisane Review--AD

The Wellness Tea

Okay this tea got me at a moment of weakness. I don't accept much tea anymore for review and certainly this isn't the type of tea readers of this blog are looking for. But I suppose we all could use a couple of herbals in the cupboard and mine is especially bare in this regard. I have one box of elderberry tea I purchased at the beginning of the pandemic, and then I have a couple of mint teas for tummy issues. I used to have an extensive herbal collection in my younger days, but fell away from using herbs when I attempted to treat a medical condition and ended up far worse as a result. In proper quantities, herbs can indeed be powerful, but in general they fall far short of modern medical interventions. 

Let me tell you how I got this Wellness Tea. At the end of November my state had the worst coronavirus statistics in the nation for at least two months. One of my childhood friends named Darren is an emergency medical technician who told me how dire the situation was. Darren is actually a birthday buddy to me. We were born on the same day, same year in the same small town hospital. My dad liked to joke he took home the prettier one. Darren's dad joked he took home the smarter one. We grew up on the same street and so I've known him longer than I have known my own siblings. Anyway, he now works in the same hospital that we were born in. He spends time on Facebook using humor and other tactics to push against our high school classmates, many of whom are virus deniers, anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers. 

Just before Thanksgiving Darren said that all the hospitals on the north central part of the state were full. All the hospitals in the nearby Twin Cities of Minnesota were full. He had a patient lying in a helicopter on the tarmac in full heart failure with nowhere to send this guy for help. After six hours during which time the man could have died, Darren finally found a bed in Duluth, MN, a three hours drive away and flew the patient there. 

The next week I got an email from someone at The Wellness Tea asking if I wanted a package of their tea for review. Normally that would be a no, but I took a look. I noticed this tea contains herbs to address inflammation and congestion, as well as generally comforting tonic type spices and roots. So hey, I was offered a free bag and I took it. All I have to do is review the tea. If you're not interested, certainly feel free to X out of the post now. 

For any degree of effectiveness, generally herbs need to be in therapeutic quantities, and there is no way a teaspoon size portion of herbs will treat anything. At best this tea will be a soothing tonic. On the plus side, the tea is made in the USA and is certified USDA Organic. The ingredients of interest are Ashwagandha Root and Astragalus. Ashwagandha root is an evergreen type shrub used as an anti-inflammatory among other things. Astragalus can be used for upper respiratory infections and asthma. You can buy quantities of these herbs plain, but I don't suggest that because Astragalus grown in the US can contain selenium, and it can also upset the stomach if taking too much. This Wellness Tea contains a small amount of the herb, and also chamomile and ginger would negate any tummy effect. 

The rest of the ingredients in the tea are mainly tonic herbs, except for elderberry which can work as an anti-viral, it binds to viruses preventing attachment onto cells. I keep elderberry for this reason. It can't hurt and a tea made from it is pleasant. 

I brewed one teabag in the suggested 8 ounces of boiling water (236 ml) for five minutes. Generally chamomile and lemon balm are steeped in boiling water, but the roots in this preparation really should be boiled to extract the benefits. If I were sick and taking this I'd probably boil the teabag on the second steeping. 

The tea tastes strongly of chamomile along with cinnamon and turmeric. Dandelion root is a little acrid and I can taste that. The turmeric is probably responsible for the slightly cloudy brew. I added a dash of maple syrup to cover the acrid dandelion root and overall make the tea a bit more pleasant, but it's not bad. Anyone disliking herbal tea however will probably not find anything to like in terms of flavor. 

Overall the tea is comforting and produces warmth in the chest and throat. It would be very soothing for anyone recovering from coronavirus or another chest cold. The herbs are positive for the immune system which may not help if yours is in overdrive. I can't see any reason to drink this as a regular tonic because the roots are fairly selective and you don't need them as a daily supplement although some herb heads might argue that. 

For a "coronvirus tea" I certainly can't find anything more specific than this at my local grocery, and I don't have access to an herbal apothecary. So it's a welcome addition to my cupboard just in case. I haven't been sick this year except for a couple of mild colds. I'm hoping I can hold out until the vaccine. At the end of December, my friend Darren posted a photo of himself getting the vaccine, and honestly I cried a little. We're older and I am just glad to know the virus won't take him, and he will continue to work at the hospital where we were born.

The Wellness Tea is a little pricey at $29 for 30 teabags, but if you don't have anything like this on hand for colds and so forth, it might be worth a look. You can get 20% off with code TWT20. 

Monitoring My Purchases 1 Kilo 2012 CNNP Fu Brick

Happy New Year! 

With a new year ahead of us, in a burst of probably short-lived optimism I am going big with my tea drinking. Actually this is less about optimism and more about realism at this stage of my life. Facing up to my considerable tea collection I have a need to really monitor past and future tea purchases and focus on exactly how much tea I am drinking, to enjoy what I own and gird myself in the event of tempting new teas dropping in my favorite shops. Right now I am confident in my ability to enjoy what I own, but less so facing the event of a whole year of tea releases without buying something. One way to get real is to focus on drinking up things like this 1 Kilo 2012 CNNP Fu Brick I bought back in 2016, and wrote about briefly at the end of that year. 

I really need to get honest with myself about how long it takes to drink up teas like this, and the only way to do it is make myself drink it every day until it is gone. Now, in the mornings I usually enjoy a large mug of tea with my first set of meds for the day. The teas I drink in the morning are not sheng pu, but rather things like hongcha or oolong. In December, however, I decided to drink up all the excellent Mojun Fu brick tea I purchased at the World Tea Expo in 2017 as a morning tea, even though I normally think of fu brick as an after-dinner digestif. But in December I discovered Fu brick is quite agreeable and comfortable to drink in the morning when the tea has a few years aging in it. I feel confident in committing myself to taking a few months to drink up a full kilo.

Drinking up a full kilo, mathematically speaking, depends upon how much tea I brew per day. I plan to use my Teforia machine for brewing, and I often like to use the same set of leaves for two days in a row if I can because I am lazy and don't want to rinse out the leaves every day. Determining how long it will take me to drink up this brick depends on whether I go two days on my teas or just one day, because obviously going two days means twice as long to drink up this brick. Right now, the math on 1 kilo of tea drinking 7g per day means I would finish the brick sometime in late May. If I go two days on 7g of tea, I'm looking at drinking this brick until mid-October this year. 

This is a sobering reality and why I am going to do this. Once you get past 55 years of age, thinking about how long teas take to drink is quite a different dimension than when one is under 40, for example. If 1 kilo of tea is going to take the better part of a year, which it looks like it will, I need to think about just how many of these years I have left in my life. Now I can certainly drink my sheng and other teas later in the day, and this 1 kilo of tea is just my morning beverage. But how many years do I have left to enjoy teas?

Thinking this way puts a different spin on tea buying. Committing to nearly a year on a kilo limits me on drinking something else. It also challenges popular "wisdom" in tea circles which suggests that you need a tong (jian) or more of a tea to really "know" that tea. But if that tong will take you a year or more to drink, how does it feel after age 50 to think you maybe only have enough time left for 20 jians of tea? My parents died earlier than that and I have health problems, not to mention this pandemic. Do I want to spend more than one year on any single tea, or would I rather enjoy as much as I can of the many teas I own and have a nice variety on my tea menu?

I am suggesting to myself, rather strongly, that the idea of buying tongs after age 40 is probably not a good idea, even when the tea is excellent, either in value or in quality. A tea needs holding and storing for at least 10 years. Some people might plan to sell their teas after a certain point, but I don't plan on doing that. Realistically one cannot expect or possibly even want to spend a whole year or more on a single tea when you only have 10-30 of those years left. Do you want to limit your life to only 10 more teas? 

Back to the idea of holding teas to sell, the idea of selling teas is nicer than the reality. I spent a decade selling stuff online, and I can't face doing the shipping any longer. It's easy to list stuff for sale online, but shipping is even worse today than it was when I quit doing it five years ago. Nowadays Amazon has spoiled consumers to expect fast shipping. If you don't get that package out in two days, people will be emailing looking for their tracking number, especially when they are spending $100 or more on a purchase. You cannot count on the same good health you enjoy at 40 when you reach 60 and beyond. Finding boxes, wrapping, printing shipping labels and driving to the post office takes a huge amount of effort when you are older and do not feel so good on some days. Afterward you get to deal with the eventual crop of unhappy customers, because that is a reality of doing business. All that will feel worse especially if you're fire-sale-ing your tea, which you probably will be unless you are sitting upon some extremely rare and desirable teas of the most excellent storage. 

Second brewing here, lighter than the first

Don't get me wrong, buying tongs at a young age is a nice idea if you really love the tea. You will have twenty years to age that tea before worrying about drinking it. But think about how many tongs of tea you actually want when it takes a year or two to drink that tong and you only have 20-30 years left. You're down to 15 tongs that you can reasonably drink assuming you can keep up 7g a day until age 70. Do you really want to commit the precious years you have to only 15 teas, or would you rather have a collection of many more single teas and enjoy as many tea experiences as possible? Of course if you have a family who also drinks with you then the metrics change a bit, but most of us in the west are single drinkers, not members of a four person family where everyone drinks tea. 

So, in the short term I am going to commit to drinking up this kilo brick as my morning tea. I brewed up 9g yesterday and it turned out rather stronger than I like. The Teforia I use because I am lazy expels the liquid forcefully through the leaves and completes 3 steepings per carafe. So, my first carafe is strong. I noted a fine nutty flavor, no storage notes to speak of and a pleasant feeling in the stomach. Today I brewed the same leaves again and got a much weaker cup. I am on the fence a little because I should optimally reduce the leaves down to more like 5g and change them every day, but I doubt I will. 

This 2012 Copco brick is fairly good, with a nutty flavor and only a few small sticks. I purchased it originally from a Hong Kong seller who since closed down his website and only sells on eBay now. Fu brick is fairly green until about 5 years or so when it starts to darken. In addition to my considerations on how long a kilo will take out of my life this year to drink, the reality of this brick in my collection is that I never found a decent storage solution for the tea. I had it in a plastic bag half open for the four years I have owned it. 

I feel bad that I bought a big brick like this when I had no room to store it properly. I am fortunate that the large size of the brick kept the interior with some golden flowers intact, but definitely not as much as I like to see on Fu tea. Someone in a more humid climate or someone who stored this tea decently should aspire to a fully encrusted brick of golden flowers. I can really taste the difference of a well-crusted fu brick, it has a tangy zip on the tongue that my brick is lacking. The tea is decently aged enough to drink, but less than optimal amounts of flowers. Fu is not a very expensive type of tea, so I don't feel as bad as I would storing a sheng tea badly, but that's why this brick is neglected, all my storage is stuffed full of sheng puerh. I need a separate solution for fu brick and just do not have it. Thus the tea is drier than it should be, though on the positive side any touch of Hong Kong, of which there was little to none anyway, is gone by now. 

So, I anticipate that my new project to drink up this brick will finish sometime between May and October, leaning more towards October at this point. I will post on Instagram at some point showing more progress on the brick. The project will be a success if I tire of this tea and convince myself that I have no business buying a full kilo or more of anything at this point in my life. 

If you want to buy Fu brick tea, I notice that Yunnan Sourcing has added more fu brick teas to their site, including on the US site. These teas are fairly expensive, and most are still green. To get an aged one you need to look at 5 years and older. You can find fu brick for about half those prices if you're willing to put up with eBay. I notice that the seller I bought from still has Copco Fu bricks on eBay, his name is tea8hk if you want to have a look at those, but I see plenty of cheaper $40/kilo bricks elsewhere on eBay. Heicha teas are more popular nowadays on western tea forums as people are looking at drinking options that cost less than sheng puerh with far shorter aging cycles. I hope more US sellers start to carry heicha teas, especially if they can find exceptionally clean examples. 

Puerh Goes Nowhere

Road to Nowhere
white2tea

Over Thanksgiving weekend, I finally turned my wall calendar over from March to November. March was the start of coronavirus lockdown and the nightmarish 2020 that upended life for almost every society worldwide. Like many people, I developed symptoms that clearly indicate I am not myself. 

I found myself mentally focusing on silly matters, which means mostly everything unrelated to tea. For example, I worried about my surely imminent death from the virus, along with that of everyone else in my household including the cats. I'm not obsessed by toilet paper because I have plenty of tea wrappers to use in a pinch, but empty shelves in the grocery store proved almost as alarming as Chawangshop no longer shipping. I stewed over the greatest destruction of children's education in my lifetime, the complete meltdown of my state government and near civil war across the country, along with meat shortages and most alarming of all missing tea shipments. I thought I was mostly okay through rising body counts and idiot virus deniers, but tea shipments going missing gave me dry heaves. The world seemed surely over and I might have to go back to coffee. 

Then in November Houde posted some new teas for sale and I snapped out of it. After spending nothing on tea in over a year I dropped nearly $500 of government stimulus money I'd been saving for my county cremation. Once more I thrilled at the sight of Bulang Brick and indulged my Mengku madness. Leave it to Houde to inject a sense of hope I had been missing all year with the cheery muggy warmth of his Houston storage. 

Very quickly I got the feeling the world might go on after all. I took a look around and discovered Chawangshop is shipping again, and posting some new teas. Yunnan Sourcing is really stepping up its US store, adding a healthy stock of Dayi and beefing heicha offerings in the especially large brick sizes that are wholly impractical but supremely comforting to peruse. Locally, Macha Tea Company imported a supply of white2tea beengs. I can't completely take comfort in that because I know the tea hogs in Madison will likely buy everything up in short order, but at least I had my chance had I needed anything. 

Most of all, I note to myself what a rock of stability puerh tea is, a port in the storm, a safe haven of good feeling. Puerh tea goes nowhere, it sits undisturbed in storage until I and only I decide to move it. Unlike a world full of fast changing, life altering events, puerh tea stays mostly the same once you have a decent storage system. You can choose to turbo charge your tea by adding some heat if you wish, or wrap it up and tuck it away against any change at all. It's all up to you. Lacking any say over almost everything else in life, puerh tea represents the ultimate form of control. Puerh as a hobby brings the comfort in hard times that only hoarding can bring. 

Aren't you glad now that you made the sensible choice of investing in hard pressed tea disks? We have no worries of running out of tea like matcha people or hongcha people who must drink what they have in a year or essentially lose it to deterioration. I can hide in my house for years with a tea that just gets better and better with almost no effort on my part. On top of that my old slow tea might improve in value rather than tank like the stock market. 

Right now, puerh tea is going nowhere fast, neither in the east nor the west. Other than shipping, I for one think that's a rather good thing. 

Five Years On: white2tea's 72 Hours

Back in 2015 I made some excellent decisions about puerh tea. Mainly in buying as much as possible. Today the prices of puerh tea have risen dramatically beyond what I was able to afford just a few years ago. One of my purchases included 72 Hours by white2tea, a tea which has long sold out. I managed to find the original listing for it, however.

In this listing, the blend recipe is supposed to age rather early, and peak at around five years. Now that I have stored the tea for five years, I am taking the time to give it a try.

Originally I tried this tea in a session with TwoDog in the summer of 2015, he had pressed the tea in June and in July visited our home state of Wisconsin when I got to meet up with him. He didn't tell me the name of the tea, nor share much except that he mentioned he got the blend recipe from a tea friend. TwoDog had watched over a few beengs of this blend and noted they became sweeter and more complex within a short time.

The only tea I know of that ages this quickly is Xigui area tea, but I don't know much about blends and I'm sure there are other teas that mature more quickly as well. Xigui tea is supposedly in white2tea's 2015 Pin and 2014 Apple Scruffs, a tea I regret not buying at the time. But again, I can't be fully certain of this. What TwoDog has said is that he cannot make any of these teas nowadays at a price point that people will pay, great tea has simply risen in price well beyond what most of us can afford.

In my original session, we also drank a 1960s aged raw puerh which quickly eclipsed any first impressions I had of 72 Hours. I was given a small bit to take home, and enjoyed it for a couple more sessions. I still have maybe one more session of that sample. But I want to try a bit off the actual untouched beeng which I stored together with a few other white2teas in a canister, adding a bit of moisture here and there over the years.

I can see from the beeng that some oxidation has occurred as the leaf has darkened. My question is whether five years in dry storage is enough to move the tea along. I break off a hefty 12g since this is supposed to be a sweet tea. Brewing vessel is porcelain gaiwan.

First steeping after the rinse is bitter with notes of root beer, chicory or chocolate as well as a bit of hay. I also notice a note of traditional Chinese medicine, just in the first steep. This note may have been picked up from the other beengs in the canister. I notice a strong cooling sensation in the mouth and throat. The choco continues through to steep 5, along with the bitterness. I really leafed this strong. The cup smells much sweeter than the actual brew tastes, a strong floral and cotton candy scent I find in many pricey teas like my CYH samples.

Steep 2

Steeps five and six are the money steeps. Here I found a deeper base note of black pepper along with the bitterness and root beer and fruit. These steepings feel completely "round" to me, is the word I thought of, round like the nose on a fine perfume where you have top, middle and bottom notes. This tea has all three in steeps five and six. The bitterness changes to sweet in the mouth, though with less cooling than earlier. The full profile of flavors is remarkable compared to other teas I own.

Now I feel glad for buying tea that I aged myself. In these money steeps I don't need to brew or taste around anything unpleasant. No off storage notes, no processing issues like smoke or dirt. This is pure, as clean a tea as I can get. While I find tremendous benefit in buying semi-aged teas, particularly more traditional factory teas with some years of aging elsewhere, I have to taste around the problems in those teas like with processing and storage. The biggest reason to buy house teas from white2tea, the young and higher end stuff, is to get access to the leaf as close as possible to straight from the trees. What I can't find in the market nowadays is compensations in pricing for processing problems like burnt leaf tips or overly humid storage. Tea is just expensive based on how old it is more than any other factor.

Steep 7

I lose the pepper note in subsequent steeps but not the bitterness. I can attribute the bitterness in part to my heavy leafing. But no doubt this tea is not at a place I expected in year five which points to my storage. I believe that the original idea of this tea maturing in five years is based on storage in a more hot and humid climate. The tea was expected to mature, sweeten up and lose the top notes after that. My tea has not lost the bitterness and I still have the full profile of the tea. On the one hand, I am glad the tea is preserved and I haven't ruined the tea in any way. I felt a bit worried I might need to drink this up in one year, and I had hoped to keep it longer. Now I can see that the tea needs more time and honestly I would rather hang on to it. This is one of my better white2tea beengs.

We also discuss the problems of dry storage, and I don't have any acrid or sour notes which tells me I'm on the right track. We don't mention enough the benefits of dry storage, done right, which mainly is keeping the full profile of the tea intact. We talk about tea retaining its value, and value in older teas is mainly in preservation. It's fine to push teas for one's own benefit, but if you want your tea to hold value, the storage focus needs to be on preservation as well as aging. We need a balance between moving the tea along toward an aged profile while keeping the character of the leaf intact. I think it's fine to push a heavy factory tea but I don't intend to do that with teas that have such fine top notes. I know I wouldn't want to buy a heavily stored delicate tea, I will save that for more pungent examples.

Going forward, my 72 Hours beeng needs to continue to mature but I need to watch it carefully for that peak. I may or may not reach it, my tea could lose the top notes before the bitterness changes. I plan to re-sample a few of my blog teas this year and will share any changes I find. If you want a similar example to 72 Hours, consider picking up 2015 Pin, yet another tea that cannot be made at a low price point today.

Letter to a Prioress 2

Mother’s Day 2020

Dear Prioress__,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.