A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘musings’

Village names

July 4, 2025 · 2 Comments

A bit of a history lesson from an old tea drinker here. Back when I first started drinking tea in earnest, around 1998 or so, I mostly hung out with older tea people here in Hong Kong at the Best Tea House. The crowd was mostly an older generation who grew up drinking dim sum tea, and then discovering this new style that was getting popular starting in the late 80s and early 90s. They would tell me that when they got into tea, especially in puerh, the scene was still dominated by the old sellers who only had traditionally stored teas. When they asked at these shops if they had any dry stored, new cakes to sell, the store owners looked at them funny and asked “why? That stuff is undrinkable.” Back then, teas were identified only through names made up to denote different batches. So you have Red, Blue, and Yellow Marks, you have 88QB, you have traditional characters and simplified characters (nobody called these 8653 back then), you have things like Snow Mark and Water Blue Mark (shuilanyin) etc. The definition of batches were based on the wrapper plus maybe some characteristics of the tea. Where did the tea came from? Nobody knows. You knew they were from Xiaguan or Menghai tea factories, but that’s about it.

Enter Zhenchunyahao, and you have the emergence of Yiwu. Now, Yiwu isn’t a new name, per se. For people who owned and drank the antique, pre-war teas, they are familiar with the name Yiwu, because it was where a lot of these antique tea outfits were based. Their neifei would say they are from there, etc. This is also why the Taiwanese who made Zhenchunyahao went to Yiwu – their express goal was to recreate antique teas, so they went to the one place they knew where the antique tea shops were from. Zhenchunyahao had three productions – 95, 96, and 98. The next batches that started getting made with a place name attached (or advertised) was things like the very early Yichang hao – which was Yiwu – in 99.

It’s not actually true though that antique tea outfits all came from Yiwu. And as puerh gained popularity, people found references to other mountains – the old six great tea mountains of Gedeng, Mangzhi, Manzhuan, Yibang, Yiwu (Mansa really, but let’s not quibble), and Youle. People also started calling teas from north of the river by their mountain names, because that’s actually where a lot of tea was and is still being produced. By early 2000s, you started seeing cakes produced not only with Yiwu on the name, but also some of these other places. Bulang, Jingmai, Nannuo started appearing on cakes by around 2003. Some of these names, like Jingmai, have totally fallen out of favour. Back then, from what I understand anyway, one of the reasons they were more popular was because they had good road access. To go to some of the more remote areas meant dirt roads or even having to hike. Nannuo could be reached by car easily. Also, for western facing vendors, one of the earliest to appear was 101 plantations, which I just googled to still exist. They were one of the OG Jingmai producers (along with He Shihua, another name consigned to history).

By around 04/05, and certainly in 06, more specific names, especially village names, began appearing. At first it was villages in Yiwu – places like Mahei, Luoshuidong, and Yishanmo. Even Gaoshanzhai was sort of far out, and nobody had heard of Guafengzhai yet – certainly not in 06/07 when I was in Beijing and hanging out at tea shops every week. 06 was also when Laobanzhang became a thing. I remember how hyped it was, how everyone raved about the strength of the tea from Laobanzhang. Prices were astronomical by those standards – a few hundred RMB a cake! For new tea! Insane!

Since then, every year you would have one or two places that became the village du jour. Names like Bingdao, Mengsong, Xikong, Xigui, Walong, etc etc. Most of these only became known to the general public after 2009/10. I cannot remember the precise years when they appeared now, but every time someone “discovers” a new village, it would get hyped, prices would shoot up, and everyone floods the market with a cake claiming to be from there.

Does it mean that these places never produced tea before? No. I think two forces are at play here. One is an infrastructure one – as roads were built and communication improved, information about more remote villages went out. Producers, especially boutique producers looking for an edge, would namedrop these new places as pristine, undiscovered fields of ancient trees. There’s usually some truth to these, but as is the case with all such nomenclature, it’s a giant case of “trust me bro.” I remember when CGHT came out with those Tongqinghe cakes in maybe 2009. What’s Tongqinghe? Nobody had heard of them. He claims he went out there with some armed guards or something because it’s close to the border and found this great new tea that’s super strong. I think in the past, what had happened was these teas would’ve been brought to the more central locations like Yiwu and sold that way, but as producers were looking further out for more “authentic” teas, they instinctively narrowed geographic designations to match this new reality. All of a sudden, a new village was on the map as the next best thing. But how much of the cakes actually consist of real tea from those particular villages? Honestly, only the producer knows. How are we, the average consumer, going to be able to tell if something is from a new place if nobody has sold tea specifically from this place before?

Then by maybe 2015 or so you start seeing people talk about Guoyoulin. Technically, this means forests that is owned by the state and is a legal designation of protected areas. However, it is possible to have permission to carry out some commercial activities in these forests so long as they’re not harmful to the overall environment. Again though, because there is no appellation control regime in China for puerh, anyone can slap any name on pretty much any cake they make. Go to any tea market, or on Taobao, and you’ll see Guoyoulin galore. Just like how the Laobanzhang “three stamps” wrapper is probably the most common wrapper of cakes on Taobao, Guoyoulin, while an interesting concept, has no real meaning so long as there’s zero enforcement of what is actually in a tea.

Sometimes you can sort of date things based on village names – a 05 cake claiming to be from Xikong, for example, is at best a retcon and at worst just a fake. Is a 2025 Xikong any more reliable though? Yes and no. Now there have been enough productions of these places (and thankfully, not much new villages anymore, relatively speaking) so that you could theoretically go back ten years and say “yeah, this tastes like all these other ones from this area from different vendors.” But when it’s different – you could just as well chalk it up to different season, maybe different areas within the same village, or different production processes, etc. Place names are, in many ways, more of a marketing device than something of actual value when it comes to evaluating a tea.

Categories: Teas
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The Longjing rule redux

June 9, 2025 · 1 Comment

Old timers on this blog will remember the Longjing rule, in which I stated that one should not go to Hangzhou to buy Longjing – because the best tea has already left town. Recently, as I’m going around Taiwan talking to folks and doing research on my project, I have once again reaffirmed this rule.

It’s more tempting than ever these days, driving up to the tea mountains, taking in the scenery, and stopping by some farmer’s shop where you can taste all their offerings and then buy some tea to take home with you. You got it straight from the source! It must be cheaper and better. Well…. not so fast. As one owner of a big wholesaler in Taipei told me, when you go up to the mountains and buy tea from the farmers, you’re getting stuff that they had already picked over. Think of it this way – you’re a farmer in, say, Dayuling. You have a tea farm to run, and bills to pay. You’ve got a nice batch of maybe 300kg of this fancy stuff you just made this year. It’s good. It’s very good. You can sell it for top dollar to anyone. What do you do? Do you sit on it, hoping some random Joe will drive up and buy 150g at a time? Or do you send a sample to the same guy in Taipei who’s been buying teas from you for the last twenty years, and sell the whole batch of 300kg in one go?

I think the choice, if you’re a farmer, is obvious. Of course, maybe you hold back a little bit, keep a bag of a couple kg leftover at home to sell to the tourists. That’s always possible, but here’s the other thing – tourists are generally not repeat customers the way a big wholesaler is. A repeat tourist customer is buying maybe a kilo of tea from you every year. A tea trading firm is the big business, you want to keep them happy, because they pay your bills. And quite frankly, if I drop any of you into Dayuling right now and you drink 10 different teas from the same farmer – you probably would have a hard time picking out which one is the best one (as would I). The difference in quality that we may perceive while touring at the mountain is minimal. Yes, the per unit price we will be willing to pay may be higher, but in the meantime the farmer is sitting on 300kg of unsold inventory.

Things, of course, have changed a bit. These days many farmers, especially the more enterprising ones and ones who have younger family members helping out, are branching out into direct sales. But direct sales is hard work. It’s extremely difficult to differentiate yourself from all the other farmers also doing direct sales. Customers then gravitate towards people who have won awards from competitions, to ones who are good at social media in promoting themselves, or who are just somehow more distinctive due to some other kinds of advantages. None of those are easy, and they would still, quite often, sell to wholesalers because it is not ideal to rely entirely on simply selling to tourists. Many I’ve talked to would take on orders for teas from resellers – sometimes even people who they know is going to rebrand the tea. They’re perfectly ok with that – it’s part of the business and it provides stability to the frontline producers.

The point of the Longjing rule isn’t to say that you should never buy tea when you visit tea areas – by all means, go do that. If you’ve never been to a tea farming area, visiting one is pretty fun. Seeing how different farms do things is also interesting, as they all have little quirks and preferences. But, don’t expect the best things while you’re there, because chances are the best teas have long left the farms to go to the big cities where you first landed.

Categories: Misc
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Minimum image requirements for vendors

April 27, 2025 · 4 Comments

While I’m in Taiwan I’ve been having tea a few times with Alex from Taiwan Tea Odyssey. In our conversations over random teas, obviously one of the topics that would come up is vendors. I haven’t really looked at any online vendors for quite some time – well, online vendors that are Western facing, anyway, since I have really no need to buy from any of them. Alex is much more familiar with them than I am. But since we talk about them, I end up on their websites to look at stuff. And my, things are bad.

Specifically, I’m talking about images. What shocked me is that, years and years after I first started buying tea online, in many ways vendors have regressed. I’m seeing people selling tea whose only photo for a tea is a slightly blurry, non-white-corrected shot of the loose leaves. No liquor shot, no wet leaves visible. Ok, I can sort of understand if the tea being sold is an older puerh, with very limited supply of maybe a couple cakes, and is expensive – the vendor may not have a ready sample to brew up to show buyers (although, if that’s the case, how would the vendor know it’s good to sell at the listed price?) But for loose leaf teas there’s really no excuse. It’s the cost of business to at least show the dry and wet leaves and the liquor in a white neutral and consistent style. You can add in your artistic shots, but at a minimum you need those three things.

When it was still alive, Taiwan Sourcing was pretty good about this, if I recall correctly. But so many vendors these days have inconsistent shooting styles (some evidently taken from auctions/suppliers of theirs) and only showing you dry leaves, often with white balance that are way off, and sometimes showing you wet leaves but more often than not showing you nothing at all. If there’s a liquor shot, it’s usually just some generic “teacup on a wooden desk” style, with no ability for the viewer to compare between different teas. That’s worthless.

It’s pretty obvious why you want shots of dry leaves – that shows you what you’re buying, presumably. Wet leaves, as any seasoned drinker would know, is useful to examine. It can often tell you things about the tea that dry leaves cannot – two teas that look very similar when dry can appear quite different when wet. For puerh, wet leaves give you clues about storage condition. For oolongs, it gives you information about oxidation and roasting, as well as general processing (hand picked, machine picked, etc). With no wet leaves, none of this information is available to the buyer. The only signal then is price and the often vague description of the vendor.

Liquor is also extremely important for obvious reasons, and for some reason many vendors seem to be foregoing this part of the sales pitch as well. I cannot understand why it has become acceptable in 2025 to sell teas without showing you a picture of what the liquor looks like when you brewed it. Ideally, this should be consistent – the liquor is, say, a standard cupping 3g in 5 minutes brew, or something like that. Only then can you actually compare between the ten varieties of oolongs that are being sold, for example, or to compare the storage condition of the puerh that is offered. Liquor shot at an angle using different teaware without colour correction is pretty much pointless – I can’t compare them. Does this add to the cost of doing business? I would like to think hardly at all – after all, the vendor listing the item should be trying the tea at some point, no? I would also like to think that better information would lead to more informed purchase decisions, and for those on the fence, they may feel more comfortable buying tea with those information available. In the day and age of 4k videos and lighting speed internet connections, how is it that some decent photos cannot be had? Tea drinkers, start asking your vendors to give you better product photos. You deserve better.

Categories: Misc
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Blending, again

April 7, 2025 · 2 Comments

Over the years I’ve had some changes in what I believed in. I googled blending on this blog and it seems like last time I talked about it extensively was some (many) years ago. It’s probably time to update that view. I think I was wrong.

Traditionally, and still very much practiced today, is the art of blending tea. Why do tea sellers blend tea? It’s simple – to control for quality and cost. The first thing one needs to remember is that the kind of people who would come back to this URL and read this blog constitute an exceedingly small minority of the tea market. The vast majority of tea drinkers have no interests in the topics raised here, and do not care for such things such as which village a tea was harvested in or what season it came from. They just want the medium grade TGY or Assam from their local shop, go home, brew it like they always do, and have the same taste that they have come to expect. Blending is for that, which is the vast, vast majority of the market.

It’s also for businesses. If you’re a tea seller, and your supplier from the tea factory keeps sending you stuff that vary sufficiently in quality that you can’t be sure it will be the same, then how are you going to do business? How do you supply the restaurants, the regulars, etc? You can’t. It is the job of the producer/wholesaler to make sure they have a steady supply of the same tea, day in, day out. So, blends.

For teas like oolong, the process of blending also comes in additionally with the process of roasting, which levels the tea into a uniform taste, and also helps preserve it for the journey ahead for export. But even things like green teas are blended, for the most part. Japanese sencha, for example, are rarely single origin. They’re blends of different kinds, sold at levels that the shop deems appropriate – with fancy names for easy identification, but the names tell you nothing about where the leaves are from or what season it is from, other than when they advertise it as shincha, or new tea. Look at Ippodo for example – a bunch of cute names that are really just “top grade” “medium grade” etc in disguise. That’s how teashops used to, and still mostly, operate.

The internet, for the most part, changed that, along with changes in the structure of the market. Farmers now have the ability to sell direct to consumers, although depending on local regulations and conditions, that may or may not be doable. Japanese tea farmers, for example, still overwhelmingly only grow tea, and the processing/production is done by someone else who then sells the teas. Taiwan is a free for all where everything is possible, from big operators to tiny farm-to-market sellers, and China is similar. There’s precious little direct to market stuff from places like Thailand and Vietnam, where the tea is mostly for commercial use. South Asia I’m less familiar with, but with big estates I think they’re not really comparable anyway to the smallholding farmers you see in East Asia.

The direct-to-market sellers can cater to the crowd who read this blog – people who don’t mind, and might even celebrate, variety in their supply. All of a sudden, drinking TGY that taste wildly different year to year is not a problem, it’s actually a benefit. Sellers can tell you that this year, because of less rainfall, the teas grew slower but are therefore more concentrated in taste, but production volume is lower so prices have to go up etc etc. For the most part, the buyers have no real way to verify that information – you just have to trust the seller. It does taste different, sure, but is it better than last year? Well, you still have some tea from last year, but it tastes kinda similar, maybe a bit different, but that’s probably because it’s now a year old tea, right? RIGHT?

Let’s be honest for a second – unless you’re in the business and are tasting hundreds of teas a month from the same genre, over a number of years, chances are your ability to distinguish this level of difference is not high. When presented with teas that are from the same general region, using the same leaves and produced roughly the same way, telling which one is better and which one is worse is skilled work. I can usually tell apart stuff that are from different altitudes, etc, but if they’re similar, it’s not that easy.

Which, again, is where blending comes in – maintaining stability of product – because it is a product. It is only for the select few of us who spend too much time thinking about tea where seasons, locations, etc matter. It’s like single barrel whisky – most whisky drinkers are happy drinking factory bottlings at 43% abv, blended to maintain stability so that the Lagavulin 16 you buy now tastes roughly the same as it did ten years ago when you celebrated your graduation with a bottle. But aficionados seek out the new, the exotic, the variety – it does not, however, make the product better.

One recent way to explain blending I heard from an experienced tea man here in Taiwan makes sense to me – let’s say there are ten points to a tea, one for each aspect (body, smell, smoothness, and so on). If on aspect is bad, you take off a point, because it’s really obvious when it happens. But, if you blend ten teas together, and they each have one point off but all for different reasons, then while your tea’s total score might still just be 9/10 if you add them all up, you no longer have that one big obvious flaw that everyone can taste – instead of 0 points for one aspect and full point for everything else, each aspect is now at 0.9. For the average consumer, that change is no longer obvious because you no longer have one glaring flaw, so overall, your tea is better as a result.

It might seem pedantic, but there’s a reason why blends exist – and why traditionally shops have blended teas for generations. Many older shops still do that. In the hands of a skilled blender, they will be able to combine a number of less-than-great teas and make something great at a reasonable cost. Just because something is directly from a farm does not automatically make it better, at least when we are talking about tea.

Categories: Information
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An old ghost

January 20, 2025 · 8 Comments

This is the 19th year this blog has been in existence, which, frankly, is a long time, even if the past few years it’s more of a ghoul and less of an active blog. The reason I still pay for hosting to keep all this up is because, every so often, people would tell me that they’re going through the backlog and finding interesting information in it. I know how annoying it is to have a resource online just disappear on you, especially in this age of social media where everything goes away eventually, so, this site stays up.

It does also mean that there are lots of what are now skeletons on this blog, memories and impressions of places and people that are no more. I was in Yongkang a couple days ago, and passed by this storefront. It’s a dead shop, obviously, but I remember it as a teashop I visited on a few occasions the last time I stayed in Taipei for a while, back in 2007 when I would mundanely post every day about what I drank that day. The shop was called Hui Liu, and at the time was a vegetarian restaurant/teashop. I think I even bought some tea there, a couple ounces. Even by the end of my stay in 2007, I had stopped going to Yongkang for tea – it’s too touristy, with prices to match. These days I visit there mostly for the food, and for spaces where you can sit down and brew tea with friends.

But it did trigger a couple memories of how it used to be like there, and I dug up the old post of me talking about it. I was rather eager to learn more back in the day. Funny thing is, I don’t think I ever went back to either Yetang or Hui Liu. Yetang, from what I can tell, is still open. Hui Liu closed I think in 2018, replaced by some other place which has also now closed, as you can see in the photo above. I should really go back to Yetang and see what it’s like now. The owner, from what I can gather, spends most of his time in the mainland teaching tea these days. Hui Liu, on the other hand, is now just a memory.

Categories: Teas
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In Memoriam: Kihara-san

June 19, 2021 · 3 Comments

About ten years ago when I first got back to Hong Kong, I was wandering around in the pre-children days and went to Lau Yu Fat to see if they had anything interesting to sell. When I got there someone was already sitting there with old Mr. Lau, drinking some tea. It was a Japanese couple and they were having some tieguanyin. I joined in, wanting to try some puerh or another. The tea was not very remarkable. I don’t even remember if I bought anything that day – I may have out of politeness. But as I was just doing research that ended up in the article A Foreign Infusion, I had a fun and exciting conversation with this Japanese aficionado of Chinese tea. Afterwards, we exchanged contact info.

I didn’t expect much from it, to be quite honest. While I’ve met many people over the years over tea tables, the number of people I’ve actually kept in touch with any regularity is small. Kihara-san, though, was different. He loved traveling, tea, and good food. Hong Kong was a frequent stop for him and his wife, and they would visit at least a couple times a year, always staying for just a night in the same hotel. I also happened to go to Japan every year or so. Before I knew it, I would be meeting him a few times a year, over food, tea, or both, and inviting him to places that I know. We even once met while we were both in Taiwan, with him taking me to a place he knows near the Taoyuan airport. Good times.

Before the pandemic hit, we had plans to go out for sushi together next time I visited Tokyo. While the Sukiyabashi Jiro is world famous for the documentary and the three Michelin star, Kihara-san thought it was “too old fashioned – too conservative.” This other place, he said, would be more exciting. I had also wanted to finally see, in person, his heirloom teapot that he inherited from his grandfather, who was a trader in Nagasaki. It’s a zhuni pot, Siting shaped, and beautiful. I’ve seen many such pots on sale before, but it’s always special to handle one that’s got family history.

A year ago on June 18th, as he often did, he posted a photo of a sukiyaki place that he went to. It was the same place he recommended me to go almost exactly two years prior that served up some good beef in some basement in Ginza. 好食, he said, which is Cantonese for tasty. I implored him not to taunt people like me who were, at the time, locked down and unable to travel anywhere. The next morning, I received a reply – this time from his wife, saying that he had suddenly passed away in his sleep that night.

The news was shocking – while he had been having health issues, he seemed to be on the path to recovery. The passing was sudden. The loss, irreplaceable. A year later, I still haven’t been able to go to his tomb and pay my respects. I haven’t quite reconciled with the fact that I’ll never see this friend again, to enjoy discussions with him over good food and tea. My heart goes out to his widow, who had to navigate this awful year coupled with the passing of her husband. I know I’m not along in mourning for our friend – he had many friends all over the world, and it’s a testament to Kihara-san’s magnetic charisma.

On this memorial day of his passing, I am having some roasted tieguanyin, something I know Kihara-san would very much like. I hope that, in the great beyond, he could be enjoying as much good tea as he would like to have. Kihara-san, you’re very much missed.

Categories: Teas
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All quiet on the Hong Kong front

October 24, 2018 · 18 Comments

A few months ago, Tony, who used to run Origin Tea, messaged me this:

“You know, I was thinking the other day. You’ve already got more tea than you can drink in your lifetime, and most of it are teas you do like to drink(hopefully). You’ve already got a stupifying number of pots. There isn’t really much of an HK tea scene, and what there is, you know already. ….. so these days….. what more is there for you in tea? Periodic trips to Taiwan and |Japan keeping things refreshing?”

Well, he’s not wrong. My tea life these days is very simple – drink tea, usually in the office, and often the same kind of tea. There are a few go to favourites that I drink, but aside from that – not much else. I don’t buy new tea, generally speaking, because they’re both expensive and not that great. I drink stuff that are 10+ years old, usually. They sort of hit the right spot of reasonably priced and good tasting. I even bought some ten to twelve years old Dayi and they are very drinkable now. Don’t let anyone tell you 7542 is bad.

A consequence of this is the blog has suffered. I don’t have much new to say, and I don’t really want to repeat myself all that much. What I think is already mostly said somewhere on this blog. It might require some digging (and thus my request for crowd sourcing some kind of archive – I’ll get to work on it, and thank you all for your feedback). But if one is patient enough to go through the older posts, especially stuff that were posted after I moved here from Xanga, then you will find the blog to be about as informative as it’s ever going to be.

I suspect we all reach a point like this. Unless I’m posting endless reviews or some such, there is only so much to say.

Categories: Teas
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Crowdsourcing an archive

July 12, 2018 · 13 Comments

So, one reason the blog isn’t nearly as active as before is because I don’t have a lot of new things to say. I feel like a lot of stuff that I need to say, I have already said (sometimes multiple times) somewhere on this blog.

However, the way this blog is currently organized is not very conducive to reading older posts. You can scroll chronologically, but that would include a lot of drivel with the more interesting posts. Some people have told me they have gone back and read everything, but even then, keeping track of stuff is hard. You can try the various tags I used, but I have kept those fairly general, so they’re not super useful (probably an understatement).

Thus I am writing here to ask for your help – if there’s something I’ve written in the past that you believe is interesting/useful/changed your ideas about tea, then I would love for you to tell me via a comment below (preferably with a link to the post itself). I’m going to try to collate them into an “archive” of sorts with individual links to posts on a separate page, so that people visiting this blog for the first time have somewhere to go to read the more interesting things. I see traffic statistics on posts, so I have some idea what are the ones people get linked to, but more traffic doesn’t mean better, especially since more clicks makes no difference for me given that there are no ads. So, tell me what you want to see in this “archive” of posts. I’ll try to keep it short-ish – maybe an upper limit of 20-30 posts in the past. We shall see, and thanks in advance for your suggestions.

Categories: Misc
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Buy less, buy better

March 1, 2018 · 6 Comments

These days I’m not doing much buying – there’s just no good reason to. Part of it, of course, is the slow realization that I no longer need anything. There’s only so much tea one can consume – assuming 10g a day, you’re talking 3.6kg a year, which isn’t that much more than 1.5 tongs of tea, roughly. That’s 15 tongs for ten years, or 60 tongs for basically 40 years. You really don’t need that much.

Of course, this is coming from someone who already has a lifetime supply of tea, so I suppose it can come across as one of those posts where someone rich is telling others to live simply. However, looking back, I think there’s something to be said about buying less but buying better, for the simple reason that the crap, the stuff that isn’t very good, will never be revisited. If you’re buying and storing puerh, and are holding onto that cheap tong of whatever that you picked up hoping that it’ll turn into something better, chances are it’s not going to happen – it will stay terrible, and you’ll never drink it, and ten years from now you wonder why it’s still there because it’s still bad and you have other better teas to drink.

I know I’ve talked about hitting hard with a hammer, but there’s a big caveat with that – you only do that when you know something is good and something you’d want to drink. Having a whole bunch of stuff that you hope will turn into something you may want to drink years from now is a terrible proposition – and will usually end up with just wasted space. There are warehouses full of crap in places like Guangzhou. Those will eventually have to come to the market. The price for old but mediocre tea will never go up much, even if it’s old.

Getting rid of the tea also presents a problem – I have no idea what to do with the tea that I don’t really want. If it’s something I wouldn’t want to drink, chances are I wouldn’t want to sell it – because it feels wrong to sell off tea that I know is no good. Tea also costs money to ship, which is not great. What exactly does one do with unwanted tea? Compost? It’s a problem and there isn’t even really a good solution.

The same logic can apply to teaware, which, of course, I also happen to be sitting on a lot of. My normal rotation of yixing pots, for example, consists of only about half a dozen pots. The rest of them just sit there to look pretty. It’s fun collecting, and I enjoy every piece. However… there comes a point when you have too many. I probably long crossed that line, so these days, only stuff that is really special are worth collecting. Otherwise….. forget it.

So, when choosing something to buy, buy less, but buy better. Better, of course, is the hard part. But eventually that will pay off in the long term.

Categories: Teas
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Tea service is hard

December 31, 2017 · 8 Comments


Restaurant tea service is often bad, I think mostly because it’s difficult to get right. Of all the things that a server needs to do, making tea to serve a customer is probably one of the most time consuming. You have to gather at least 3 pieces of wares, put leaves into the pot, add hot water, then bring it over and pour it out for the customer plus all that cream and sugar business. Compared to coffee, where you really only need one cup for the coffee and usually only a button press for the actual liquid, it’s a lot of work.

Moreover, there are other hidden problems in tea service. Like yesterday morning when I drank this cup – the tea was supposed to be English breakfast, but the problem is the little metal pot they used had been brewing quite a bit of peppermint tea, it seems – my English breakfast tasted like peppermint English breakfast, which was, well, kinda gross.

I’ve always bemoaned the poor state of affairs in most tea service at restaurants, but as I have family in the F&B business, I have also come to appreciate exactly how much trouble it is to offer good tea in a restaurant setting. You can’t charge too much (certainly not more than a cup of specialized coffee) and you have to try to make it quick – all the while trying to offer something serviceable, and most of your clientele don’t really care. There’s a good reason why so much tea service is so mediocre. Nobody is really willing to pay for the good stuff.

Categories: Teas
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