A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries from February 2024

Crashing prices

February 26, 2024 · 5 Comments

A couple years ago I posted about an outing with a friend to go to the local Dayi store to drink new 7542s (I think I deleted the image by accident). The tl;dr is that they’re very average and way too expensive. Now, two and half years later, we have this:

This is a screencap from Donghe which shows you prices of puerh. For the 2020 7542, which reached a peak of around 50,000 RMB/jin (42 cakes) we are down to around 29,000 RMB. It’s still really expensive at over 600 RMB a cake, but nowhere near the peak. I’d also imagine prices will continue to fall as the quality simply isn’t there.

More importantly, you can easily buy ten, even fifteen, years old 7542s on Taobao that are genuine that cost around this price. People trying to sell you the 2020 version will tell you it’s special, they used better leaves, blah blah, but in reality it probably is just another run of the mill 7542 with very little difference that you, the drinker, will notice some years down the road – certainly not at a price that is so inflated.

I have increasingly come to think that for most teas, especially ones that aren’t special in some way (i.e. most big factory productions) you’re just better off buying when you are ready to drink them – there is such a huge backlog of teas that are sitting in storage somewhere by people who bought them years ago to “invest” that are, well, looking for drinkers. Why buy new, when you can buy old?

Categories: Teas
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