A Tea Addict's Journal

I bought some tea today, specifically, I bought a few tongs of the Fuxing cakes….

I decided I didn’t want to wait around for three reasons

1) I didn’t want a repeat of the Quanji Bulang experience, where they didn’t have the cake anymore. Fuxing only has less than a jian, total, of the two teas left, so I didn’t want to run the risk of one or two people cleaning it up and buying everything remaining. Good thing they’re still there.

2) I didn’t want a repeat of the Quanji Bulang experience before they discovered they didn’t have it anymore — where I had to haggle down the price to what I paid for originally only a few weeks before. I don’t think this is the kind of shop that will pull such a nasty trick on me, but you never know for sure.

3) Most of the younger puerh I’ve seen around Taipei are either high priced, fancy maker stuff (doesn’t actually mean higher quality, mind you), or run of the mill, big factories stuff where they’re often cheaper in China. Older stuff, I decided, are too expensive for what they’re worth. I think I need more 90s tea together in order to store them well — one or two cakes just won’t cut it, storage wise. Given that, I’m not sure if it’s better to buy those now than to wait, say, 10 more years till they’re well aged, and just buy them for drink it now (or, perhaps, at that point some of my current teas will be drinkable)

So, I went there and got some stuff. While there, we had a few aged oolongs, variously of 15 years to something like maybe 25-30 years. I like this stuff, and I got a bag of the 15 years old tea for free as part of my purchase. I didn’t get a discount, but I guess this was sort of a discount.

I also got two free samples. One’s a Chen Guang He Tang 06 Spring Yiwu Chawang…. which the owner said in her opinion is way better than the fall production. Then there’s a 2007 cake made by another Taiwanese tea guy, which is outrageously expensive but which she said is quite good. Well, so those are the freebies I got to take home to play with.

Meanwhile… I am looking at my tea, thinking what I should do with them here until I take them back to Hong Kong with me. I wonder how the cakes in Hong Kong are doing…