2022 CSH Jiang Xin Sample Box

I just cannot say no to free tea. Nobody teaches a puerh tea lover this skill, and whatever about tea drinking is supposed to teach moderation, well this lesson has thus far escaped me. Really I am not planning to continue tea reviewing, but when CSH messaged me on Instagram asking if I want their new sample box, what I managed to type was "thank you for thinking of me." And left it at that. Next I got an email with a shipping number. 

CSH offered this sample box free to 500 people back in September. After reaching 500, the sample box was to sell another few hundred at around $5 and then increase to $9.99. Right now I see the price for it is marked down to $4.99 with the regular price at $35. But you can still get it for free if you are a new customer to Chen Sheng Hao by signing up for the newsletter. Got all that? 

The sample box is cute and comes with a complimentary cotton shopping bag, which can double as tea storage if you are running out of room on the sofa. The tea arrived in mid-October for me after the harvest shipping vacation passed. You get two puerh samples, raw and cooked, along with samples of black (red) tea. 

First I tried the black (red) which is 1-2g of tea in a pyramid style tea bag. They really need to up this by a gram, I did not feel I got much strength out of this to consider buying 100 tea bags for $100. The tea has the malty chocolate profile typical of Feng Qing area teas. If you need tea for the office where you cannot properly gongfu loose tea, this might be an option. But in purely terroir terms, Yunnan Sourcing offers the same origin tea for a fraction of the cost. It's just okay. 

The sample box contains yet another pyramid tea bag of raw puerh. I passed on this, the leaves looked rather finely chopped which may be fine for a tea bag. But I just cannot bring myself to try this. If anyone has done, feel free to drop a comment on it. Maybe I passed on something good, I don't know, but I binned it. 

Moving on, the star of the sample box is the 2022 Jiang Xin raw (kinda passing by the shou sample). I was not in the mood to like this after passing up the tea bag, but the tea is a decent one. The leaves are very green and this tea might be too much on the stomach for some. I didn't bother weighing the chunk and probably should have, but I assumed this would be a one and dump at first. 

The tea is listed as Bulang large leaf, but also as "mixed," or blended material. The blend may contain other years as my soup had something of an orange tone. The blend is obvious immediately with the first few brews, the hay-like Bulang large leaves mixed with what tasted and smelled like a more floral northern tea. The brew has a touch of smokiness, evidenced by the little pieces of blackened leaves (char) in the strainer, but it's just right and not too much. 

For those of you new to factory puerh, this tea is one of many series "editions," and should properly be understood as an edition. This means the factory has created a series that is likely to remain fairly consistent in the blend from year to year. Factories create many of these blends, and even more in the past 5 years. The "recipes" don't have numbers in the way the state factories had decades ago, like the 7542. This Jiang Xin, translated as "craftsmanship" is thus the Craftsmanship edition recipe, and the series seems to be new in 2021, so we have two years available to purchase. The 2022 retails for $249 for a 357g beeng. This compares to the higher end 2022 Lao Ban Zhang at over $900 a beeng, and thus the Craftsmanship edition is among the budget offerings, although the Zodiac series in the $50-75 range is the least expensive CSH tea. 

In the first 3 brews, the blend is very obvious. I can easily pick out the floral leaves. But the Bulang large leaves overpower the brew quickly. This tea is a bitter goalie kick to the face, especially as the tea cools, and I'm here for it. Reading the tea description, the tea is to have decent huigan (returning sweetness) and the tea made a real effort in my mouth. The bitterness is fully mouth coating and long lasting, pulling hard at my taste buds in the back of my mouth, but didn't quite convert. My cup had a lingering floral aroma that dispelled after three brews. 

As I said, I was not prepared to like this tea, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. The tea lacks any of the subtlety of the more pricey Naka and LBZ teas. But it is a powerful tea nevertheless. I got a nice buzz in my face which might be the blood rush to my mouth to cope with the intense bitterness. Oh hell yeah. This is the type of tea I crave in early summer, a bitter strong punch of puerh. 

This tea illustrates why puerh tea is the king of green teas. It's why Chinese tea, Yunnan puerh in particular, is one of the world's most powerful natural things you can consume. I think of malt whiskey or chili peppers as comparisons in terms of strength. This tea makes coffee taste like brown water, and regular green tea taste like weak Kool Aid. Teas like this are why tea drinkers so often settle on puerh as their tea of choice. Really no tea compares with raw puerh, once you get into it. 

I forgot to take a photo of the brew.
It was orange/yellow, as usual. 

Looking at aging potential, we have the strong grade 8-ish Bulang leaves, and the blended leaves. Will the blended leaves age out or get overwhelmed over time by the Bulang tea, which really requires some heat and humidity to age. The difficulty with all these factory edition teas is figuring out which of them will turn into anything decent after 20 years, assuming the tea is well-cared for. And whether shelling out $249 for a decently bitter tea, albeit a blend, is a wise purchase or whether one should should go cheaper if bitterness is really all you want. 

I think if you live in a hot and humid climate which can really care for this tea, it's worthwhile to pick it up, maybe the 2021 since this 2022 year is considered a wetter year. The caveat here is we don't know what the blend is, and there may be some older tea blended in. 

Here is what I suggest. Pick up the sample box for $4.99. Get a taste of this now. If you are in puerh for the long haul, put the Jiang Xin series on your mental list and look out for it in 10 years. A well-stored version in the reseller market from places like Taiwan or Malaysia won't cost less, but decent storage on this tea even at $400 a beeng might be an excellent quarter-beeng split situation with friends. 

CSH seems to be paying close attention to tea chatter in the west. I think they are well aware that the market for the higher end is just not here in the west, and they are trying to promote the more budget side of their offerings. I continue to wish them success because we are fortunate they are marketing directly to us, offering loyalty points and sample boxes. Factory direct doesn't get more accessible than this. 

Brewing Blind

The end of the line on this blog is closer now. I am not quite there yet, but I can see the end of Old Cwyn and her tea insanity. Nature, and probably poor nuture combined, are having their way with me slowly but surely. While I have no immediate plans to end our tea writing, we are getting to where plans must be made going forward. At the beginning of this blog, in the very first entry, I wrote that I planned to drink tea to my death, and I will do everything I can to accomplish this goal. But days are coming where I know I will be stuck and need to ease myself into sliding out of writing.

My health condition is stable, currently. However, I received a diagnosis of macular degeneration about a year ago. I mentioned this in the Prioress letter earlier this year on the blog, but I did not really explain much. I got this eye diagnosis a year ago, and I was told back then I have 5 years or so of eyesight, now it will be 4 years. There is no treatment other than to hope for the best.

I have noticed my central vision blurring for a few years already, especially during night driving. I also noticed I could no longer read lines on the television. Last year I managed to finish a video game 100% without being able to read any of the text on screen. Now I have a much larger TV and can read a bit again, but with my IPad I sometimes need to use the magnifying glass. It’s annoying because my main activity of enjoyment, along with tea, is reading. I stopped driving a car at night, and mostly I let others drive now even during the day.

Anyway, I have had one year to notice a bit more deterioration and grow accustomed to the idea of losing more of my sight. To be completely honest, I was told back in my 20s by my childhood optometrist that I would probably lose my sight in old age. I guess I had some markers he recognized. For most people who need glasses, eyesight tends to stabilize in a person’s 20s and 30s and mine never did. I needed a new prescription every year or so. Which is why I didn’t think anything untoward over my blurry vision these past few years, because in my life I always needed new glasses at any given time. But here we are.

After the bad news, the first thing I thought of was naturally my tea, because I probably love my tea more than my son and cats combined. Well, at least part of me does, the part I named Old Cwyn and gave this obsessively selfish pig voice so she could get it out.

I read someplace that when bad things happen in England, the “power grid people” can see the electricity spike as folks around the country simultaneously fire up electric tea kettles. I relate to that most endearing trait. So, of course of all the things to worry about, puerh is up there at #1 or damn close. I can get in an aide to help me shower, but who is out there to hire to check my puerh collection?

This is a real worry.. We have mold to watch for, insects and god only knows what else that can happen in puerh storage. Fortunately, my tea is lidded in crocks and various other places. Containers. Tea cups and tea pots. Okay a few other places and some is sitting out. Well, it is still a bit summer here, so I have things on the porch for the heat. Yeah, some fu bricks out there also. Dear god. I am mostly adept at smelling any problems in the tea, but soon enough I could be drinking small insects and not know it.

Even worse is the issue of how to brew tea if I am blind, or mostly blind. I cannot possibly rely on anybody else to know how to brew a puerh tea. Would you? Would your spouse even know how to brew your puerhs, much less find the one you want to drink when you ask them to look? I suppose one could write English on the wrappers, but I hesitate to add inks to my wrappers, that seems dodgy although I know people do it. I worry about ink and how it might bleed into the tea. Even if I label things so I can get somebody to find the tea I want, the issue of how to brew puerh is not something that just any fool can do.

There is a huge difference between someone who is blind from birth, or childhood, and someone who develops blindness later in life, in terms of getting around problems of how to do things. My eyesight has been lousy most of my life, so I got accustomed early on to functioning in my living space at night without lights on. I keep things in the same places for years on end so I can find stuff in the dark. But brewing puerh tea is another matter: we are dealing with boiling hot water, gongfu tea/water ratios, bitty teapots and tiny cups. I can use a mug instead of a cup. Some of you might say “just grandpa that shit” but no way. Shou okay, but I would rather give away all my sheng than spend my days drinking grandpa sheng. Forget that.

I thought that after a year of hearing this news I would figure out what to do about my tea, and about brewing blind, but I really don’t have any answers yet. Denial works for me most days, but I need to keep thinking ahead even if I don’t want to. I did some preliminary research into some possible brewing options. For example, here is a Braille infuser photo I found online.

Then we have Braille objects like this one.

My thoughts on these items were that I could buy them early, get accustomed to using them and I would be all set. I even found some potential amusements already.

But I have two problems here. One, none of these products in these photos are for purchase. They are prototypes available for sale and manufacture. To order something like this, you need to place an order for a minimum number of units. Think about how many units of tea kettles, brewing devices and such that a vendor purchases wholesale to sell. I cannot think of any tea vendor who has more than a handful of any brewing item to sell to anyone. A place like Walmart orders hundreds of electric kettles, but how many Braille items are needed in the general marketplace? Surely people need these devices, but the population of customers is so small that I don’t think Walmart would even consider the volume sufficient to order a Braille mug to sell.

Another problem, I don’t know Braille. My friend DW decided to help me on that, and he called up our friend Marty for me, a teacher recently retired from the Wisconsin School for the Blind.

“Marty says it’s not that easy,” DW phoned me back. “He said adults mostly are unable to learn Braille if you didn’t learn it when you were a kid.”

I know Braille books are out of the question anyway. Most libraries stock popular trash that even the large print collection has nothing I would want to read. Braille library books are probably worn down to the point that only a very skilled person could decipher the dots. Braille teapots just don’t seem practical for someone like me, even if I found one to buy and bought it early to learn the buttons while I can still see.

You know what would be so perfect? That damned Teforia tea machine that crapped out on me. 

The Teaforia had an app I ran on my IPad. I could voice-command that app to brew my shit. The Teforia had a double-walled brewing globe and double-walled carafe, no risk of burning myself on the water, nor the tea, and I had a mug that held all the tea from the carafe. I could easily fill the water basket at the sink and replace it onto the machine without needing any eyesight whatsoever. But then, the stupid sensor for the globe stopped sensing it was locked on. Even though the machine worked perfectly well I could no longer get it to start up with the sensor error because the stupid “smart” device lacked a basic ON button. 

Supposedly a new Teforia is in the works, but every time I check on when it will be released the date gets pushed back another six months. Probably supply chain issues and no financing. I have given up on it ever being released.

So here I am. After a full year mulling on these issues, I have no answers whatsoever as to how I will care for my puerh teas, and how I will choose one to brew except at random, and how I will brew them properly without burning myself. I have zero ideas and nobody to help me and I know I am too fussy about tea to ever accept that anybody can brew puerh to my perfect taste. Even I don’t always brew well. You know how it is, at any given time puerh tea goes through changes and whatever worked last time to brew the tea now needs brewing around.

I have a few non-tea-related posts of things I want to put up on this blog. They are mostly some old photos and a few Wisconsin historical things I fell into that I want to post someplace. I don’t have anywhere else suitable for them on the web to post, it’s not worth starting another blog for non-tea-related stuff. I apologize ahead for the non-tea content that may not interest anyone. But the end is not here yet, and I still have plenty more to write about concerning tea. The puerh tea scene certainly remains sufficiently insane to provide a never-ending trove of silly trips and tripes to get me started.

Before the Fall

The last day of September is here already, and in my part of the world autumn is arriving. We went from turning off the air conditioning earlier this week and turning on the heating the following day. No lazy days with the windows hanging open this year. I am more tired nowadays, getting hard to find the energy to sit down and write as the basics of daily living take more effort at my age. I have so many unfinished drafts. But I can appreciate the start of cooler days more as I slow down, especially the turnover of teas I reach for. Over the warm summer, greens and shengs clutter up my countertop. Between those I reached for coffee sometimes, and many days it was just too hot to drink any hot beverage. Instead I had a lot more water, sparkling water and diet cola. 

This summer I planned to brew up iced teas, but I gave up after a few tries. I have to admit once and for all I just do not like iced tea. I don't mind slurping up the remains a cold cup of a tea that starts out hot, but a finishing swig is not the same as a full tall glass of iced tea. I tried a big bottle of that unsweetened iced tea you can find at the grocery store, you know the one, it has a green label and green top on the bottle. It was so terrible I tossed half of it out. Mainly I wanted the container, thinking I would refill it with cold tea, and I still have the bottle. And I made an effort with my new Stanley French Press, doing some grandpa green sheng teas with it and pouring them over ice. Then the weather got too hot and with no A/C in my bedroom, I started out my day too warm to bother brewing hot tea and waiting for it for cool off, and ended the day still trying to cool off. 

So, with some relief I set aside my iced tea efforts now and turn to my darker teas. I need to get the Fu bricks off the porch. This week I pulled out my  2018 Arbor Red from white2tea, the last cake I have. After a year or more drinking Fu brick, I have not yet dipped back into my hongcha with any determination, and I have forgotten how good Arbor Red is. The tea is ridiculous in how long it brews. With 4g of tea, I can brew two steepings a day  poured into a mug and the leaves are still just opening up 5 days later. I am not a fan of the sweet and malty Yunnan gold style hongcha teas. I prefer something more astringent and savory that packs a punch of caffeine. 

Arbor Red leaves after 5 days

Arbor Red for me fits with my night owl self, it's a hefty snifter of tea energy. I don't wake up in the morning feeling perky like many people do. I feel like a sack of shit. I forced myself up in the morning back in the convent days, but ended up in the bathroom so many times just feeling nauseous for no reason other than the hour of the day seemed unholy to me. As a kid I used to think about all the executions at dawn in WW1, like Edith Cavell, that's the level of dark morning is for me. In the summer, early mornings are not so bad and I enjoy them more. But fall and winter, my body nopes out. I am the perfect night shift person, and took as many late shift and weekend shifts as I could in my clinical days. By 10:00 pm I feel stellar. Give me a heavy caffeinated beverage and I can rock out the night getting so much done. I thought I might turn around in old age, but instead I am just more of what I always was. My family hates it.

As hongcha teas go, Arbor Red is not a light floral tea, I like it for the robust astringency like chewing grape skins. It's an easy transition if you like English-style assams. If budget is a serious issue, I'd recommend looking at Yunnan Sourcing's Feng Qing hongs, or their purple leaf blacks. But Arbor Red is a better value than it seems with the initial outlay, simply because of the longevity of the leaves. I can get 5-6 days out of 4g of tea, with doing two steepings. So for me, a 200g disk lasts nearly 200 days. That brings my cost down to more like 25 cents a steeping. 

Day 6 on the same leaves, hardly see the bottom yet.

I really loved beautiful hong teas from places like Joseph Wesley (whatever happened to that vendor??), but the cost for those teas was around $10 or $20 for a small amount of tea that lasted maybe a few weeks at best. So while $85-95 initial cost for Arbor Red seems steep, it's a better value for the longevity than some of the gourmet red teas I have enjoyed in the past. 

So I re-upped on Arbor Red yesterday, and the mail can take 3 months if it does and I'm good for awhile. I need to dig out what I have left of aged Shui Xian pillows and the roasted oolongs I have been hoarding for years. Not to mention checking out the more aged puerh teas I own. I won't think about winter until it hits, but at least I have teas to look forward to trying again. 

2022 10th Anniversary and Liu Bao white2tea

No, I have not forgotten my blog. Still here with at least four blog posts in my head and a couple in actual draft. Here I have a few notes on teas held up because I just cannot find time lately to sit down for a decent tea session without any interruption. Mostly I am caffeine-on-the-go over the past month, grabbing a mug of something and trying to remember to drink it before it goes cold. Then I sit down and already the sun is gone for the day, and I am overtired, overheated and ready for bed. These are the usual excuses of a life that needs to slow down and get easier because I'm so ready for the shit to stop. 

This month I wanted to write about these two teas from white2tea's 2022 lineup. As usual for me these past few years, I try and buy a couple things from their new teas to support the shop and see what TwoDog is up to. I planned to buy the 10th Anniversary tea because I own the 5 year Anniversary beeng. TwoDog suggested the 2022 Liu Bao when I said I wanted something fresh to try. 

Mostly when you see Liu Bao for sale, the tea is aged already or has a head start either with pile fermentation or oxidized as pressed bricks. I really wanted the opportunity to try Liu Bao fresh, and un-pressed, so I can gauge its transformation over time. The leaf quality here is pristine. Most aged Liu Bao teas are broken leaves and dusty bits, so for me buying a fresh tea like this is worth the money. Liu Bao ages fairly quickly compared to puerh tea, and with proper humidity maintains itself for many years. But unlike factory Liu Bao, this tea has not undergone any pile aging or oxidation.

I drank this tea for over a week straight as my a.m. caffeine shot. It's not harsh like puerh, so I was fine with it on an empty stomach. The leaves are long which limits the amount I can pile into a brewing vessel. I used a gravity steeper and did 3 steepings per day, which means I got two mornings of tea out of each dose. The tea is reliable for a good six money steeps, which is fairly typical for Liu Bao.

This tea does not resemble puerh so much as a very fine green tea. It is lightly floral with a mild honey note, and very grassy which most green teas are. I find the sample well worth it for the experience of drinking Liu Bao fresh as I have wanted to for some time. I spent many years trying various incarnations of green tea processing and can finally add this to my experiences. If I were looking to age Liu Bao for myself, this is definitely the choice by far, although one advantage of factory Liu Bao is the handy storage basket which you can get from white2tea only if you buy a full 250g order. I'd much rather have this than broken dusty bits that most factory Liu Bao teas are. 

2022 10th Anniversary Beeng

I planned to buy this tea as my purchase for 2022, because I own the older anniversary beeng. I bought a full beeng plus a 25g sample too. Lately I have been doing this with teas I want to keep intact in the wrapper. I probably won't open the beeng any time soon, the point is to store it in Wisconsin and someday see how the tea does, he can have it back to compare with his storage in China. Hence the sample size to keep track of the tea without opening the beeng. I did the same with 72 Hours, tried the sample I had instead of opening the tea. As you all know, a loose beeng sheds tea in storage every time you shift things around.

This tea will only remain on offer for 2022, and then it will return to white2tea's storage. The older 5th Anniversary tea is now back on the catalog, but it is much more expensive, almost twice the price it once was. I have not opened the older tea, so I cannot compare it currently, but the two teas are not comparable. The 10th Anniversary tea contains a number of teas from 2017-2020, so not the same tea at all in the 5th Anniversary. I can imagine these anniversary teas are a memory lane trip for TwoDog of the teas he acquired during the intervening years. 

I brewed 6 grams of this tea in a porcelain gaiwan which started out as 7 grams and then I accidentally got a bit of wet cat food flung onto my tea. So I picked out about a gram to get rid of the cat food bit. 

The tea has the house floral-northern aroma many teas from white2tea have, and then a more pungent tomato vine note underneath. I did a very quick rinse of mostly clear liquid. The first steeping after that came out orange-yellow and then lightened up to a deep yellow on subsequent steepings. 

Hit with boiling water, the tea starts out very floral on the top note with a pungent, warm spicy core. I can definitely taste the different batches of tea in here. This tea is newly steamed and pressed after stored in bags for a few years. The orange color shows the oxidation on some of the older leaves in the mix. 

Subsequent steeps continue this dual note of floral fruity with a spicy base that is cooling on the throat and warm in the tummy. The blend is a good way to try a tea that has such a clear distinction between the notes. It's a strong tea, not a subtle creeper. Let the tea cool down to about 90-95C and it gets very bitter. So I feel the tea has something at the core that is maybe more 'banna-ish that will give substance after aging if the floral top notes fade. 

I noticed after steep 5 I needed to brew the tea longer than flash steeps. The tea leaves opened up quickly due to their recent steaming. I did three more brews going about a minute or so in the gaiwan. The tea still had a bit more, but the main notes now are the deeper spicy pepper ones and less of the floral/fruit. I feel like a good 10 steepings are reasonable to expect from the tea once a few years go by and the pressing sticks together more. Right now the pressing is just so recent the tea is giving more early on than it will down the road. 

The leaf examination yields some very firm leaves, a few buds but many larger leaves. I don't see any processing issues like reddened edges or char. The tea does not have off-odors at all. 

It's a good example of what white2tea offers all in one beeng with the contrast of teas. I'm not sure how this will gel together, but it will be interesting to see if it all melds in a different way over time, because right now the teas used in this blend are quite distinct. That makes it useful if you are hoping to learn more about detecting different notes in puerh teas, because the contrast is so obvious. At $98 for the 200g beeng I think it's a great choice if you are looking for a decent white2tea that is still coming in under $100. 

Puerh Personalities

Recently I found myself reading along in the social blogger-sphere and somebody has the idea to consider the puerh hobby as a personality type. This is probably accurate and I am only glad to be part of such a club, even if I am the last to be picked for dodgeball. Only problem is, the concept as a whole needs some fleshing out in subtypes. I am happy to do that today, now that I am at least nine cups in, I may have lost count. Anyway, here goes:

Peacocks 

These puerh people only buy special editions and socially desirable long-sold-out teas. Their tea is all about the wrapper. They own shrink wrap machines to preserve a beeng all costs. Aging is mostly a secondary concern and not as important as visual integrity. 

Pretty on the shelf is as pretty does in my book. But hey, a market for everyone, right? Somebody has to buy the limited-edition teas, even when the tea is exactly the same as every other production the factory puts out. 

I also include the wrapper buyers in the western vendor scene. In this latter case price-and-pretty wins all day long, no matter the tea. Very likely the person doesn't know much about the actual tea. Like I said, something for everyone. We cannot be too harsh knowing that their tea is bug-bite-free, mint condition; the pets get nowhere near the goods. They care....and it, well, shows. In fact, this person is the best type to buy tea from secondhand, and maybe the most willing to entertain a sale.

Brick Bitch 

Pry my 7581 out of my cold, dead hands. The most straightforward group, and you gotta respect the simplicity of nothing more to say. 

Water Sportsters 

Get a whiff of this one.

These folks drink wet-stored on purpose. 

(On behalf of this group I reject the term Hong Kong storage, under the reasoning that we have puerh people in Hong Kong storing in situations ranging from the basement to the penthouse and every floor in between.) 

Here is the extreme where if it isn’t wet enough, just add more, maybe with an installed humidity system. Close to compost is how these guys like it. Wrappers are immaterial and unrecognizable, the more bug bites, tea-and-water stains the better. They store their tongs in a box. Never rotated. Critters welcomed. On the plus side, you don’t need a puerh knife but a dust pan is very handy.

Tong Johns 

These are people who think a beeng is only a sample and complain about the Stamp Collectors. Their theory is you don’t know the tea until you drink the whole tong. Don’t ask them what they think about this year’s puerh. They have no idea because they are still drinking 2006, and 2007 is up next. I was gonna say still drinking the last century but I really doubt this group owns any last century. If they did they wouldn’t be drinking it, because at this point they only have one left. Mid-age drinkers all the way, purchased in bulk tong, factory-direct or bargain shopping. On the plus side, they are not tea snobs if you hate that sort of person. Happy drinking!

Stamp Collectors

Contrary to popular belief, these are not the people who buy one of everything. Let’s be real, no puerh personality is truly tong-less. These are the nerd collector people who buy puerh books and catalogs to obsess over. They pore over the catalog details with a magnifying glass to convince themselves that anything in their collection older than, say, the 2011 Dayi Gold they probably own is the Real Deal, and not a fake. It’s like the crypto folks who say "hold forever!" but they check the market obsessively anyway and chain-email auction catalog links. Although they are not selling, you could probably befriend one and weasel a sample, if you can garner their curiosity over your own ambiguous tea.

Boo-teeks (boutiques)

The perfect puerh club member willing to buy sight unseen whatever their vendor of choice manages to acquire. Ultimate puerh snob unwilling to drink whatever the riff-raff are quaffing. They won’t be bringing a factory drinker to a tea gathering unless they plan to foist it off in trade, and probably not in tea. If you want a taste of what they got, bring along a stinky cheese or a bottle of maple syrup, wine is just insulting although a single-malt peaty barrel-aged whiskey might be acceptable. 

The Crazies

The true hoarders. These are people who own tea instead of guns. They cosplay at tea gatherings, and spend hours perfecting their rituals. They buy tea when under stress and comment incoherently on social media after having a few, and maybe write tea blogs. They probably have an ex living in China. The house is a fire trap. I think they own cats although they probably resent the expense that could be more comfortably spent on teapot #175. Expect to move the tea before sitting down, assuming you get let in at all. The relatives gave up long ago and it's now down to fire code inspections to determine how long they keep going. 

Happily, I am likely in this group and I prefer my vendors are too. Assuming a vendor in this group can actually bring themselves to sell. 

Grandpas

These are the folks in happy thermos-ing mode, drop in some tea and add hot water. No need to rinse, just add more water as needed. Grandpas are not up for gongfu, might be too much for the stomach and anyway, who are you to tell them how to brew their tea? They have unwashed tea-stained cups to prove their longevity. Also, they have no interest in discussing puerh, or trying new editions. Any talk of the puerh scene yields a befuddled look that is not from the tea they are drinking. It's just that they have no knowledge of any puerh past maybe 2007. Ask them what they are drinking and they are not sure. At this point they no longer know what they have, nor what they paid, nor how long they have owned it. 

The Students

Original woodcut by Leland Struebig
defaced in a safe, non-binary manner
by the author.

We always make room for our scholastic friends trying to get a degree done, and who have puerh on the brain with not much money to support their obsession. Every year I get a few emails from broke students looking for leftover samples. You gotta adore the youthful idealism, "where can I get a tea from my birthday year?" And "how can I get some 1960s puerh?" It’s so endearing how they get offended when you suggest a sensible shou.

___________________

Hopefully this post covers almost everyone. In fact, I venture to add that if you are not in any of these personality types, you really are not a puerh person. You, my friend, are a taster, a wanna-be, and do run along back to your assam tea bags. Come back someday when you fit in more. 

The Hobby of the Loner

A tea colored car.
Actually it belongs to my ex
who lives in Guangzhou.

I still have puerh on the brain after all these years and my recent storm disaster is not enough to knock it out of me. Especially when I discover teas in my house I apparently forgot about. I find myself thinking more about the puerh beginner after my last post. What a world they have yet to discover! Most of what you discover about tea is for your appreciation and probably yours alone. 

This weekend I am thoroughly worn out from storm cleanup and days spent on the phone with insurance companies, disaster reports, roofers and auto repair shops. I put in two 20-hour days this week on all this, but one of them was spent on my cats. Both cats fell into stress events after the storm, leaving one cat with some sort of allergy/stress eye reaction where his eyes rolled up and sideways and he insisted on staying in my lap an entire night before I hauled him to the vet, yet another bill I did not need (however, the vet is also missing part of his roof, so it was an informative visit in more ways than one). My other cat went into irritable bowel diarrhea mode, which leaves him hungry and frantic. He got up on the kitchen counter and knocked the butter dish onto the floor and ate up all the butter. That led to two more days of bowel issues I don't even want to recall, and more cleanup I did not need.

But my cat thought he had discovered something wonderful with that butter, so I had to come up with a new butter storage quick. I have a ceramic French butter crock which I adore for butter. I bought it on Etsy years ago, and it's genius. You pack the butter into the lid, and then add some cool water to the crock which keeps the butter fresh longer in warm weather. Unfortunately this brilliant little crock did not go over well with my son, he just could not handle the butter and dealing with the water etc. I did not think our Mr. B. would want to cope with such fussiness either, so I retired the crock very quickly in favor of a vintage plastic butter dish. 

French-style butter crock

Now, however, we need a butter dish the cat can't get into, and so I remembered I had this crock. I thought okay, I can use this crock upside down and skip the water. Oof, a bit dusty and after cleaning it off, lo and behold I discover I have puerh in the thing. I tend to stuff bits of puerh into teapots, cups, tins, caddies, even wood boxes. Whatever I can find. Any object in my house might have tea in it. After doing this for some years, you tend to forget what you stashed and why. I started making little paper slips with the name of the tea on it. But I guess I didn't do that in this case. The tea is loose, not a chunk of anything, and I would guess at least five years or maybe even as long as seven years since I bought this butter crock and retired it. Who knows how long I have left a sample in here? It's got to be something I decided was too good to throw out. 

Well, I need this butter crock now so time to drink up the seven grams or so of whatever tea this is. I decided to go maybe 3 grams into the Kamjove with no regard to parameters just to be rid of it. The tea will probably be watery for my taste, but with everything going on, who cares? It's just tea at this point. Except the tea is astonishing. I was expecting something rather harsh or dried out or faded, just whatever. But it was absolute bliss. The first mouthful an explosion of fruit, florals, bitter greens and chicory. Omg my stress reaction is palpable, whatever this tea is suddenly seems miles and away better that anything I have had in a very long time. My overtired brain cannot even remember tea this good, though of course that is most definitely not the case, I drink great tea all the time. 

Maybe it's the disaster going on. I started on this tea yesterday when I hit a wall physically, I was so exhausted I felt ill, and so ill I actually took a Covid test just to rule that out. Today I started on the second set of leaves from the sample after taking an aspirin. And now this tea has put me right as rain. I get that this is a northern tea of some sort, actually it reminds me somewhat of white2tea's 72 Hours but that could be overly optimistic given my hysteria from the storm. 

The soup is pudding-like, but it has a structure to it, the leaves almost seem like I could overcook them in the Kamjove, but they aren't overcooking because they are thick and strong. They are green with a bit of age, yet they speak to me of a strong lineage, older trees, no new plantation here. I taste roots deep in soil beneath an almost white-tea tippy-ness. I am over-dousing with too much boiling water, but they resist torture, almost telling me "bring it on, we can take it and we have more to give." Lesser teas buckle under torture and turn into a cloudy mush. Some puerh teas that are just okay are finicky, to get the best of them you have to discover what the brewing parameters are. This one is almost a royal personage whom you can subject to anything, they never lose their dignity and give back just the same. It's a forgiving tea. As I stew over whether I need to cut down the beautiful old tree in my yard to keep it from damaging my house, I need forgiveness. I need support. This tea holds itself up to me with its strength when I need it as I need it now.

Truly fine puerh leaves can take punishment and almost any parameters. You can even drink the brew cold and the soup is not drastically worse. A truly fine puerh makes you feel much better physically, not sick or ill. People in Yunnan drink the best leaves green and suffer no ill effects from it, even when stuffed in bamboo tubes and dried over a fire. 

My who-knows-what-it-is tea.

So here I am, by myself, drinking a truly fine tea. Most tea shops don't have puerh this good. A few people may be lucky enough to live with maybe one other person who appreciates puerh, but probably not as you do. If you have fallen down the rabbit hole of the puerh hobby, it's a form of insanity that only you will ever know and understand while the rest of the world revolves around you in complete ignorance of puerh bliss. 

I don't find puerh forums much fun anymore. Sure, we can share something with fellow puerh heads, but most puerh discourse lately is juvenile with a lot of judgy people who think whatever you are drinking is utter trash. I might even think that. How helpful or fun is this? Maybe helpful on the information level of finding good teas to buy, or bad teas to avoid, but nobody loves your tea better than you do. And nobody else ever will. Wine people can attend tastings in nearly every small city, but the puerh person? Drinking alone at home today. And tomorrow too.

If anything, the attitude of other puerh drinkers can lead one to paranoia. Keep your shit to yourself if you don't like my tea, even though you never ever tasted my tea, or my storage, it's amazing how you think you know something about it. You don't. The amount of gaslighting in puerh forums can make people question their taste, temper their well-earned enthusiasm, and darken the glow of discovery. The vast majority of puerh people on forums are not collectors, they are drinkers. They are not buying tea for the marketplace or for other people, it's for themselves to enjoy. Keep that in mind. 

In the realm of environmental disaster, and anything else horrible going on, it's a comfort to know I have things to drink. I don't even know what the hell it is I am drinking, but I know it is wonderful. I just brought my body back to life with a beautiful tea, and nobody needs to believe that except me. 

Beginning Puerh with $100

My roof 

This week an EF-2 strength tornado ripped an eight mile long swath through my small town at 90 mph. It ripped out trees, branches and other debris, caving in roofs and damaging vehicles, including my house and car. I have a lot of damage to contend with, and am awaiting the insurance adjuster to come out and take a look. In the meantime we have patched the roof and boarded up a broken window. The incoming water doesn't seem to have done much damage. I am fortunate to have old growth wood in my house structure, as well as plaster board. The weather turned dry after the storm, and dried up the water quickly. Naturally when under stress my thoughts turn to tea shopping like an anxious fancy lady thinks of Harrods. I decided to sweat out the urges as best I could. After all, I have an insurance deductible to meet. 

But I recalled my earliest days reading tea forums and a post by someone who lost their entire tea collection in a basement apartment flooding situation. I don't remember how that person stored their tea or how much flooding it was, the photos posted were more after the fact. But this person had to start all over with their tea collection. Luckily tea friends came to the rescue and mailed boxes full of teas. True, these teas likely did not replace exactly what they had, and probably the owners felt happy to part with these teas, just not their best collections. Still, I wonder how I would start again, if starting from scratch today. My own teas are fine, by the way. Storing teas in big-ass crocks or old metal fridges is probably the best you can do to protect your tea in the event of disaster. Cardboard boxes on the floor, maybe not so much.

I feel like the question of "where would I start?" with puerh is the most common question people ask, with storage or maybe tea gear as the next questions. If I truly needed to start over now, how would I go about buying tea? How much would it cost me? Yikes, I stare at tea listings once in awhile and even in my last post I noted how new prices have gone so far up on teas I own that are still available to buy. I cannot replace everything I own because obviously teas sell out and then the only option is buy from a collector and pay the new prices not only for the tea, but new prices on shipping as well. 

But "where would I start?" is a two-part type of question. Where I would start is not where a total beginner might start. Obviously no one will recommend a complete beginner start out with a $500/beeng tea, when that beginner is not even sure if they like puerh. So the beginner has one question, whereas the experienced drinker starting over has questions more about replacement. 

In this post I will post things a brand new beginner might consider. Thus the experienced drinker already knowing what they like will find nothing to look at here, except some of the accessories might be of note for the future. For the true beginner, we need to keep the cost investment low in case the person turns out to hate puerh tea, we don't want people regretting too hard at the start. Likely the person already enjoys tea, so hopefully the gear can find use with non-puerh teas as well. 

To be quite honest with you, I would do exactly the same as I did when I first bought puerh in 2009. That is, I would buy the same teas, but because of my $100 start price I would pick other harvest years to stay within that budget. If you are familiar with this entire blog, nothing here will be much of a surprise. Yes, you are correct that this is tea shopping without tea shopping, entirely a cognitive strategy for me to stop me from actual stress shopping (heh). I will list per tea vendor what to get, with $100 per vendor as the goal. Obviously you don't need everything. 

Note: all photos are the property of the vendors whose items are linked.

YunnanSourcing.us

Xiaguan sheng minis at yunnansourcing.us

These Xiaguan 2019 sheng mini tuos are 200g for $12. This is probably the bottom end in terms of puerh. I think tasting Xiaguan's house flavor is a good idea for a beginner. You can really separate the chaff from the wheat of puerh drinking in terms of whether someone is going to like puerh tea or not. If you can enjoy tuos like these, even green, you can feel more confident buying tuos in general, or other Xiaguan teas in the future. If not, then your investment is small and you can foist them off on beginners who show up at your house and give them the same test. If they hate the tuos you will know not to waste your better tea on them. Minis also are easy to take on a trip with you. I can tell you traveling with a beeng or even a quarter beeng is a messy affair in your purse compared to tuos like these. 

More importantly, you need to build a palate for puerh. Xiaguan makes many teas, knowing their house flavor is helpful as a baseline benchmark to step up to other things. They represent a more northern Yunnan style of tea.

2019 1901 Taetea at yunnansourcing.us

This 2019 1901 Taetea 7572 Ripe Shou is also a benchmark starter tea. Taetea represents southern Yunnan plantation tea. Even more, it is one of the cleanest, basic shou teas you can start with. I started with the 2009 7572 and that tea is still around but horribly pricey now. This tea is still pricey at $66, it's the name and import costs you are paying for, otherwise it's probably more around $40. I notice King Tea Mall is selling it for $55, but then you have higher shipping cost to add on. (Yunnan Sourcing.US ships free to the lower 48 at the $100 mark.) If you like it, then you can feel confident trying other shou teas in the future. Keep a piece of it and try it every year to see how it tastes as it mellows. Break up the beeng and put it in a crock. It will fade if left in a cardboard box, as I found out. 

2008 Song Pin Hao at yunnansourcing.us

2008 Song Pin Hao Yiwu Taiwan-stored sheng/raw puerh costs $11.90 for a 25g sample, enough for 3-5 sessions. With this sample, you can get an idea if you like aged tea, if you like Taiwan-stored tea, and if you like Yiwu area tea. That's three questions answered by one tea. The information you gain from such a small investment will help you parse other aged teas stored in Taiwan. 

Coconut shell strainer by yunnansourcing.us

I love this coconut shell strainer for $8. It's natural, it's cheap and you do need a strainer to get out the odd bits that slip past you when pouring. I like to use a strainer to see how many particles of black burnt tea bits I find in a tea, a processing issue that affects the storage and taste of a tea down the road. More bits you need hotter and humid storage conditions to get past the flavor. You can also find metal strainers I suppose, but if you hate puerh and toss the strainer it won't be in the landfill for a thousand years or more. 

King Tea Mall

This outfit is located in Guangzhou, China so you are looking at shipping costs and shipping time. But the owner John is excellent with customer service and dealing with lost packages or shipping damage. You will get emails with tracking progress on your package, something few other shops offer, making this shop a safe beginner bet.  

2015 1501 Taetea 7542 at kingteamall.com

2015 1501 Taetea 7542 at $75 is an opportunity to try one of the most basic sheng puerh recipes, and one of the oldest recipes. It's a must for beginners to try a very traditional southern tea like this and to recognize the Taetea house flavor. Now historians will quickly chime in that the processing has changed since 2011 or even earlier, and how the tea itself is not the same as the old days, but you can say this about any tea now. Older examples of 7542 cost used-car amounts of money, so why recommend that to a beginner? Even the past two years the 7542 is selling at crazy speculator pricing, it's insane. But 2015 was a wet year, not so desirable for crazy collector types, which is why it is relatively affordable. And it has 7 years age on it in a very humid location. The 7542 is also probably the most faked tea. I don't think anyone is going to bother faking the 2015, so try the real deal for educational purposes. 

2014 Xiaguan Jiaji at kingteamall.com

2014 Xiaguan Golden Ribbon (Jiaji) tuo at $18.99, yet another Xiaguan? Think of the yellow ribbon in this tuo as the canary in your storage gold mine. This is the best tea I know of as a test of puerh storage, because nothing will kill this tea. You don't need to drink it to use it as a test. If you have overly humid and hot conditions, it will mold and you can scrape it right off. The tea will recover. It is compressed to survive rainy and hot traveling conditions. The compression is such that you can float it in water and the water will not penetrate into the tuo. Does the tuo lack a tea odor when checking your storage? Then you know your storage is too dry. Once you start experimenting with storage, and you will, it's not enough to simply check hygrometers and boveda packs, and you can't possibly taste every tea you own every month or so. This tuo serves a purpose without tearing up your entire storage. 

Digital Scale from kingteamall.com

This Digital Scale is only $5.99, an add-on to your King Tea Mall order. I don't think you can find a cheaper one anywhere. 

Puerh paper from kingteamall.com

Handmade Cotton Puerh Wrappers at $0.99, might as well toss a few of these in your cart. These papers hold up to a 500g beeng size, so you can trim them for smaller chunks. Puerh wrappers once opened on a beeng start wearing out quickly. Aged teas often come in wrappers with bug bites or other damage and require replacing. If you fall in love with a wrapper, save it and use one of these instead.

Tea table hose from kingteamall.com

Balloon drainage hose at  $1.99? Hello this is the first time I have seen a tea tray replacement drainage hose to buy, and look how little it costs to replace if you have a drainage tea table. Sure you can get hose from the hardware store, but you will pay much more than this. Not anything a beginner needs, but I spotted it and it's worth listing here for anyone needing it and you happen to be ordering from King Tea Mall already.

Taiwan Sourcing

This outfit is owned by Scott at Yunnan Sourcing and was originally for selling Taiwan oolong teas and accessories. Recently the site offers Taiwan-stored puerh teas, no doubt in response to customer demand. But before you order any teas, be sure to check Yunnan Sourcing's US site first as many of their puerh and oolong teas are already imported over to the US onto yunnansourcing.us. But the accessories are unique to the Taiwan site. 

A beautiful gaiwan from taiwanoolongs.com
(taiwan sourcing)

Anta "Sheep Fat" Gaiwan 140 ml $79 is really pricey for a beginner. Porcelain is the best material for testing the storage and flavor of a tea. If you are determined to gongfu your puerh tea, learn how to use a gaiwan. A small porcelain teapot can also work, but teapots can cook young puerh leaves faster than a gaiwan that opens up to the air quickly. Sheep fat is the porcelain color name, there is no sheep fat in it.

Sure you can go cheaper (see below), but hear me out on this one. First of all, it's awesome and I want it, I've been looking at it for years but I don't need another gaiwan. It has several things apart from the aesthetics that I like. First, it has a notch in the foot so that the gaiwan doesn't get suctioned onto the plate. This is a hazard of gaiwans, especially for the beginner. When lifting a gaiwan to pour, sometimes the plate lifts with it, and then falls off the gaiwan onto your tea table. That means breakage, a mess, and maybe a boiling water injury. 

Secondly, the 140 ml is a good size to start with for several reasons. One is you can solo the gaiwan with it only half full. Using 70 ml or half the capacity is just right for one person using 5 g or so of tea. More importantly, the gaiwan won't be so full that you burn your fingers on the lid, something that can happen a lot when starting out with gongfu. As you improve your pouring, you can then use the gaiwan fully to serve two people. I have some cup ideas below that will work well for a two-person session with this gaiwan, but of course you can get matching cups if you want. 

If you are looking at a cheaper gaiwan to start, take note of the low height of the button top on top of this piece. In other words, the button at the top is close to the lid. You can find cheap gaiwans but be careful that they don't have a tall button which is much harder to pour from for a beginner, look for low button tops like this piece has. 

You get one of these per order, not all five
Aroma cup from taiwanoolongs.com

A Fine Porcelain Aroma Set, single cup plus bowl $42. This is not an absolute must, but I can vouch for the beauties of the shape of an aroma cup for really getting the full aroma experience from a very fine tea. I have one from Taetea that only cost me maybe $10, so you can go cheap, but why not have a nice one? It is useful with other teas as well and I trust Taiwan Sourcing to properly pack it as opposed to a Taobao outfit. Also makes a nice gift idea for a tea lover. Never buy tea for a tea lover, ever. You cannot possibly pick a tea that your friend will like, but they will surely appreciate this set as a gift. 

Camellia Sinensis, Montreal

I love this tea shop but their puerh is what I would call a bit dodgy, their descriptions need work and I can't recommend any of the puerh teas currently. Once in awhile they get something factory that might be worth the splurge, but just saying. They are, however, a great source for accessories and some non-puerh teas like:

2012 "Aged" Bai Mu Dan
from camellia-sinensis.com

2012 "Aged" Bai Mu Dan $7 for 10g and up, this is a white tea beeng, not puerh. If you are going puerh, might as well try aged white tea too and get it over with. You either like it or you don't. The quotes around "aged" are my editorial because who knows?

Lin's Ceramics cup from camellia-sinensis.com

Lin's Ceramics cup 60 ml $21.38, the odd prices here are reflecting the current Canadian-to-US exchange rate. This Lin's Ceramics cup is the best cup, period, full stop. It's the shape and maybe even the thickness of the clay. If you have truly flavorful puerh, the cup will deposit the tea into your mouth in a ball of liquid which will explode with flavor. You can really distinguish mouth feel and a lot of characteristics with this cup. I never knew a cup mattered until I bought one of these. 

Also, the inside of the cup is a bone-white color. You want that color to see the color of the brew of the tea, something a darker cup will not give you, and it's much more visible in photos too. Clear glass cups are great for Instagram photos, but I'm sure everyone is tired of seeing my boring clear glass cups.

And finally, the size of this cup will work well with a 140 ml gaiwan when half full for a solo, or with two cups when the gaiwan is used for two people. At least 10 ml of water is needed to warm each of the tea cups prior to pouring, and you have that extra with the 140 ml gaiwan. Later on if you decide to buy tiny teapots the cup will be ideal for these. Lin's clay replicates very well the experience of expensive Yixing, so consider their teapots for a starter budget.

Ms. Zhang's Aurora gaiwan
camellia-sinensis.com

Aurora Porcelain Gaiwan 150 ml $28.78. Here is the less expensive gaiwan I promised. I have the matching pitcher for this, so I can say the porcelain is thick and able to tolerate the boiling water temps puerh requires without burning yourself quickly on the lid. It's a really lovely piece for the price and less prone to breakage than thin gaiwans more suited for other teas. It also has a low button for beginners.

Japanese-style porcelain cup
camellia-sinensis.com

Japanese Porcelain Cup 150 ml $17.27. Okay, it's pretty, absolutely Insta-pretty. That's about all. But it is 150 ml and will work with the gaiwan sizes above if you want to drink the whole thing at once, and still see the color of the tea.

Summary

Obviously if you buy everything I have posted here this is quite a bit of money, but no one needs everything on this page all at once, you probably already have cups and maybe a teapot or gaiwan. Each shop may have a shipping threshold for free shipping, and some things posted here are items you can add to a cart anytime to reach the threshold. None of the items above are likely to sell out too soon, many have been on the sites for years now. I tried to hit about $100 per shop, which is a very reasonable tea shop order for most people and most shops (vendors get grumpy with $20 orders). 

Quite honestly ONE beeng of a really nice puerh will cost the same as everything put together on this post!