A Tea Addict's Journal

Maybe a sign of getting old is that you become less adventurous. Although perhaps another way of putting it is that as you get to know yourself better, you also know what you like and dislike. This has been happening to me for tea in recent years, and has gotten more obvious lately. Granted, part of this is a function of having kids – having put away most of my teaware since I didn’t want them running around while I have boiling water on a hot plate, bringing them out again means I have to dig them up, set them up, and so on. So, instead, it’s a lot of tea in a gaiwan with a Zojirushi doing a half grandpa.

Moreover, the types of tea I drink these days are somewhat predictable, with a steady rotation of a few puerhs from the mid 2000s, aged oolongs, and deathroasts. It helps that some of the teas I bought 20 years ago are, well, old now. Once in a while I might try something new – a yancha someone sent me, for example, but quite often, those end up being somewhat disappointing. Yancha these days come in too many sad varieties, not least the low roast low oxidation stuff that make you wish you were instead drinking a good longjing. Puerh samples I almost always avoid, as there’s no good reason to try them, especially not solo. That’s the kind of stuff you drink with a few friends (which I still occasionally do) and discard the moment the tea turns out to be horrible, which, alas, is quite often.

These teas that you drink on the daily, that are decent but perhaps not fantastic, are called ration tea (口糧茶). They tend to be the “cheap and cheerful” variety, good even if slightly abused in the brewing process, and not something you’d feel bad about if you messed up. You probably have one yourself, even if you don’t think about it – the tea that you reach for when you don’t really want to think about what to drink today, the tea that you know will hit the spot and satisfy that itch. Once you found a few of these, life becomes simpler.

Unlike what Tolstoy said about happy families, for me bad teas are all somewhat the same – they’re usually bad in a few general ways. I just went out yesterday to have tea with some friends, and just smelling the tea and the wet leaves you can always tell when something is going to be bad. Whereas the younger me (like when I blogged daily about what I drank up till around 2010) would drink every one of these teas to exhaustion, these days it’s a quick toss into the trash unless I’m specifically trying to investigate something. Life is far too short for bad tea. Don’t waste time drinking them. Also, they might be bad for you.

Of course, what’s “good” or “bad” varies a bit by taste. I can’t really stand Liubao, for example, however good others might think they can be. The substitution effect is strong here – I’d rather drink a good puerh instead, for the same price. Ditto dancong, which have the additional issue of being often a finicky brew. Since dancong are no longer cheap like they used to be, what’s stopping you from buying a good yancha instead? Obviously YMMV applies here, but I think everybody, at some point, form these preferences and end up sticking to them.

This doesn’t mean you stop trying new things – finding those black tea from Sun Moon Lake remains a great discovery, for example (has it already been eight years?). But it does mean that when trying new things, one arrives at some destination a lot quicker – either the tea is good (and if good – if it’s good for every day drinking or good once in a while), or it’s destined for the bin.