A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘musings’

Confessions of a white paper cake hunter

October 10, 2011 · 4 Comments

I’m a white paper cake hunter. I like finding teas that are, basically, what they call “white paper” cakes or “three have-not” cakes. Generally speaking, that means cakes that have a no name brand, with no neifei, no wrapper, and no neipiao. In other words, there are no identifiers anywhere that tells you what it is. If I broaden the definition a little, it also means cakes from tiny factories and other workshops that might as well be no name.

Now, hunting for these things is easy, but finding good ones is much harder. If you browse on Taobao you can find hundreds of these no-name cakes, but very few of them will be good. Most of them fall into the “crap that will never get better” or “is this even pu?” category. Sometimes, once in a while, you’ll find winners.

I think the allure of such teas for me is that I derive pleasure in locating good teas that are unnoticed, the same reason why I sometimes take a gamble on teaware that nobody wants to buy. Sometimes you get lucky, and will get away with a great tea.

The same can be done, to a lesser and less interesting extent, on established websites that sells to the Western market. I routinely try a lot of the little known cakes that people like Scott from YSLLC sells. Recently, a cake I tried, which simply calls itself the Tongchanghuangji Yiwu, turns out to be quite decent.  I bought myself a few cakes, and will look forward to enjoying it in the future. I find teas like this to be much, much more satisfying than crowding into another well-known, and well-hyped teas that everyone has heard of. The latest Dayi fads simply don’t interest me. Perhaps this reflects the contrarian in me, and also a bit of an adventurer streak at least in terms of tea drinking. It also is probably because this is what makes the hobby interesting to me – that I’m finding new things that I will then have to analyze and come to a conclusion based on what I find. Following is so boring.

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Tea purgatory

September 19, 2011 · 23 Comments

Quite a few of you have the same problem – how to deal with teas that are really inferior, so that you don’t want to drink them every day.  However, you have too much of it, so you have to get rid of it, somehow, especially if you paid for the privilege.

These teas are often acquired with the best of intentions – you bought it thinking it might be good, and end up being a disappointment.  You bought it as an impulse (say, while you were traveling) and when you got home, it is no longer so good. Sometimes you got the tea because you used to like it, but your tastes changed. Or, you got it from some other means – a gift, an accidental find, etc. Either way, now you’re stuck with this tea that isn’t really quite that good.

I have a lot of these teas, as I’m sure a lot of you do too.  Giving them away, or selling them, seems wrong, because they’re not particularly attractive.  After all, you don’t really want to give bad tea to people, especially if they’re newcomers.  The only tea I happily give away is cooked puerh, since I almost never drink teas of that genre, and I know there are others out there who will appreciate it way more than I do.  The rest of the time, however, whether it is bad black tea, bad young puerh, or bad oolong, I’m stuck with it.

One way for me to get rid of such teas these days is to drink it at work, where I’m condemned to drink such things grandpa style, for lack of proper implements (or time) to do it right. I could probably bring a tea set to work, but since I just started less than a month ago, bringing such things, even in Asia, might be a little off.  So these days, I’m drinking some terrible, terrible work tea – a box of very run of the mill Assam, an old can of cooked puerh from Mengku that I had stashed away for no reason, and some 4 years old baozhong that I’ve been aging myself.  The baozhong is probably the most interesting of these teas, seeing as it was purchased fresh in 2007 and now approaching five years old in the same bag.  When I opened it it smelled distinctly like a slightly aged oolong – a little of that slightly plummy, sour fragrance, but when I brewed it, grandpa style anyway, it was still mostly like a duller green baozhong.  It clearly needs some more time.

I suppose this is a good thing, in the sense that I’m drinking some of these leftover teas that I’ll never otherwise touch and which will forever linger in tea purgatory until I fish them out for some reason. Now, they’re being consumed in a willy-nilly manner at work, purely for the caffeine effect and not much else.  I do need to find a more permanent solution to the work-tea problem though, because otherwise I’m going to be stuck with bad tea for a long time, and then my good teas will be in tea purgatory.

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Looking for a base

August 7, 2011 · 10 Comments

I had tea two days ago with two new friends in Hong Kong here.  It was a pretty interesting session, with exchanges of ideas of the question of aging.  One of the teas we had was a Mengku Yuanyexiang which was provided to me through a friend.  This particular sample was stored traditionally, and exhibited a taste that the two friends said they had not encountered before in this tea.  Considering that both of them have had various versions of Yuanyexiang before a number of times, this is surprising.

One of the most important thing that we all agreed on, I think, is that taste in a puerh is fickle, and changes constantly.  Mr. L, for example, mentioned how he showed some friends from up north that there’s a significant difference between tea that has been properly aired out versus tea that has not.  In the case of tea that has been through traditional storage, the process of airing-out is quite important in making the tea taste good when drinking it.  Many who dislike traditional storage don’t know that breaking apart the cake and letting it sit for six months will greatly enhance the mouthfeel and the taste of the cake, and draw conclusions about traditional storage based on an erroneous understanding of the process and the result.

Likewise, even for teas that don’t go through traditional storage, the taste of the tea changes all the time.  The condition of storage in each individual home, or in different cities, will alter the tea in obvious ways rather quickly.  One hurdle for many newcomers to puerh is to get past that veneer of taste.  This is something that I’ve written about before, but it still bears repeating.  Chasing taste is futile.  Mr. L told me a story of him buying a cake of 7572 back in the day from this one vendor here, and loved the taste.  When he went back to the same store to buy a whole tong, what he got was something different – still 7572, but without that taste he liked.  The owner insisted that it was the same batch, and he had no reason to doubt that claim.  Turns out, after much searching for years for that same taste, that it might have been because that one cake was stored outside a tong that made a difference — the tea soaked up the storage smell of wherever that owner’s storage unit is, whereas the tong didn’t get as much “air time”.  So, chasing such things get be quite futile, and expensive.

This is also important for those of us who rather enjoy the taste of some young puerh – just because you like it now doesn’t mean it’ll turn into something you’ll like even more.  In fact, among those who love the floral and sweet and fragrant flavours of a young puerh, the aging process can be a real disappointment.  It is really quite important to try real, well aged teas of proven vintage and provenance and to know whether or not you even like that taste to begin with.  If you do, great, store tea.  If you don’t, why bother?

It has been proven again and again that many currently good tasting teas often don’t age all that well, whereas a lot of nasty, sour stuff can turn out to be quite decent over time.  I’m not saying only bad tasting tea becomes great when they age, but current taste and future taste are, in and of themselves, not particularly related.  What’s more important is what we call “base” here, which means, roughly, the underlying strength of a tea.  Without such a “base” a tea is doomed to mediocrity, and I think this applies not only to puerh, but all types of tea.  It’s quite difficult to describe without confusing people how to identify “base” in a tea, but I think it is safe to say that it involves physically activating multiple areas of the mouth, throat, and body.  It has nothing to do with whether or not a tea is sour, bitter, or sweet.

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Moderation

July 28, 2011 · 22 Comments

One of the biggest pet peeves I have when I see people advertising tea is some sort of mystical, magical health benefit that pretty much promises it will do anything other than raise the dead.  Accompanying this is the pretty frequent sighting of posts on various tea forums from newcomers who say things like “I want to get the health benefit of drinking tea — which tea is best for X?”  Stores like Teavana then capitalize on this sort of thinking, and invents, without any sort of rationale, a whole series of “health benefits” of various kinds of tea for different parts of the body, with the clear implication that if you want a full body benefit, well, you better buy all of their teas.

There’s only one problem – all this talk of health benefits, etc, ignores the fact that just like pretty much anything else, there comes a point when there’s too much of a good thing.  You can, indeed, overconsume tea.  An analogy can be drawn with wine — while a glass of red wine a day may be good for your health, two bottles a day is pretty much certainly going to cause you health problems.  While it is not clear where tea’s “health threshold” may be, it has to have one.

In my experience I have had two unpleasant encounters with drinking too much tea.  The first was an instance in which I drank too much tea while pulling a near all-nighter in college trying to finish a paper.  I remember my legs were shaking uncontrollably and I’m pretty sure it was due to caffeine overdose of some sort.  The second was actually much more scary — I was drinking lots of tea in the run up to my general examinations for me to proceed on my dissertation research, and one night as I was getting ready for bed, my heart started beating at a rate and strength that was very unnatural — I thought I was getting a heart attack or something.  It calmed down, eventually, but not before it really scared me.  Doctors, of course, found nothing wrong, and suggested I consume less caffeine and sleep more.  Recently, a tea friend here in Hong Kong told me that he had something very similar — heart rate that was abnormally fast (140-150 bpm).  Doctors couldn’t find anything either.  We both agreed that tea, specifically strong, young puerh, and lots of it, may be the culprit.

I have been mostly on a “one tea a day” regimen for the past 6 years, and I haven’t had another such episode since then.  I think lots of people get the impression that I drink lots of tea every day.  The fact is, I don’t unless I’m visiting a shop and hanging out with tea friends.  Yesterday I stopped by Best Tea House to see some old friends, and I know I drank a little too much as I started feeling uncomfortable.  Like a person who is getting tipsy but who doesn’t want to get drunk, I stopped.

I know I’m going to get people here who will poo-poo the idea that too much tea can be bad for you, or that drinking only greens or young puerhs exclusively will yield anything other than pure bliss.  I’m not saying that everyone will get the same reaction — some people may have much higher tolerance for such things, but at some point, you can, in fact, overconsume tea, and at that point it will no longer be a health benefit, but a health hazard.  Tea and health is mostly a marketing hype, as I’m pretty sure that drinking pesticide laced CTC brewed bottled iced black tea flavoured with artificial flavouring agents and lots of sugar is not going to give you any health benefit whatsoever.  Drink in moderation.

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The King of Pots

July 18, 2011 · 9 Comments

One of the great things about being in a place like Hong Kong, rather than being stuck in Maine, is that there are a lot more tea people out here.  Drinking tea alone is quite common in the US, but here you can always find a drinking mate if you need one.  Since I have returned I have yet to visit a teashop of any kind, and haven’t really taken advantage of my situation here.  Today, while I was out and about, I stopped by a shop when there was an hour between engagements, and ran into someone I’ve met before — someone who is nicknamed the King of Pots.

This guy taught me a few things before when I met him at the Best Tea House some years ago while I was hanging out there.  One of the most important things I learned was that when looking at someone else’s pot, put down the lid or the body and only look at the other.  Don’t hold the lid while you’re examining someone’s pot, or the pot while you’re actually just looking at the lid — that’s rude, and may damage the ware by accident.  I’ve met many people who do this sort of thing since then, and have passed on this rule, which I think is very sensible.  I’m sure the King of Pots himself was scolded for doing it, just like he scolded me when I did it to his pot.

Seeing him again this time is quite lucky, really, because otherwise I have no way to contact him, and I would love to learn more from him as he has hundreds, if not thousands, of pots, and has certainly seen more pots than I have had teas.  Not all of his pots are good — I saw one today that was only so so, but as he explained, you don’t need a vintage or famous pot.  If you use your pot often and it’s made of decent clay, that’s better than a Ming dynasty pot that’s been sitting next to a dead body for the last 300 years.  Of course, it’s much easier to say that when you’ve got as many pots as you do.

Now, not all of what he knows or believes in is going to be correct.  He told me today that he also started by drinking tea and learning from Vesper Chan of Best Tea House, but like many others, he has since grown out of it and rarely goes back there.  I count myself in the same category, although a few generations behind him.  What we have both learned in that regard is that people who you revere as teachers early on often turn out to be, at the very least, not all right, and sometimes downright wrong.  Yet, Mr. Chan continues to attract students and adherents who go and buy his stuff, while many older students fall out of the circle.  He’s doing a service to the tea community in that he’s attracting people to come, but very often, people don’t stay as they start wandering around for other sources of things and find out more for themselves.

People like the King of Pots are the tea people I like the most — they drink with an open mind and who are welcoming of newer ideas, who want to try new things, and who’s not afraid to challenge perceived “authority” figures, who, sadly, are often just big sellers with a strong vested interest in teaching you about certain things.  I respect the King of Pots, but I also know that he’s not likely to be correct on all things, and our exchanges often turn into just that – exchanges of information, when both of us can contribute to each other’s knowledge.  Too often, I see people who are attached to one teacher and who just believe in everything the person says about tea.  It’s more understandable if it happens in places like Maine or Minnesota, but seeing people like that in Hong Kong or Taiwan or China really makes me cringe.  Learning from others with more experiences makes your progress in tea go faster, but equally important is the use of a critical mind.  That’s what I teach my students in the classroom, and that’s what I try to practice, and sometimes, like this post, spills over into the blog.

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What to do in a Chinese tea shop

July 5, 2011 · 7 Comments

I’ve covered the topic of shopping for tea in China before, and what to do, generally speaking, when going into tea stores of various types.  At the time I divided the stores into two categories – puerh shops, and non-puerh shops.  Generally speaking, I think my comments there still hold true.  If I can distill these into shorter principles of tea purchasing, I think it comes down to this

1) Don’t let them show you what they want to show you, make yourself the director of the action.  Now, this is much harder if you don’t speak Chinese or are unsure what you want, but if you have a pretty good sense of what you’re looking for, and, say, if they offer you Jasmine while what you’re really looking for is shu puerh, then you can just flat out refuse and, if they keep insisting, walk.  If you’re shopping in a big tea mall, there are a billion stores just like the one you’re in right now, and they all know it.

2) Establishing a good rapport with the person selling you tea is often a good thing, because sometimes they won’t show you the good stuff until they start to like you – once they’re convinced that you’re serious, they’re much more likely to be willing to brew you a sample of that expensive tea because they think you might want to buy it.  This is especially true if you’re obviously foreign, in which case their assumption is you’ll want nuclear green tieguanyin or jasmine. That 10 years old puerh won’t show up (or won’t be available) until they think they have a chance you’ll actually buy.

3) Number 2 means that while you should be assertive, you shouldn’t be a jerk.  Being too picky about how they brew the tea is one thing that can make you seem like a complete ass, especially if they think you have no clue what you’re talking about.  Also, bargaining for what is an essentially meaningless amount of money is not a good idea, generally speaking, both from your perspective (you’re wasting shopping time) and theirs (they won’t like you much if you push hard, or unreasonably).  If you want to bargain, which you probably should especially if the item is not very cheap and you’re obviously foreign (i.e. you might get quoted higher prices) you should at least save it till the very end, when all is done and you’re about to head out.  Bargaining for each individual thing before you’ve settled on something is a bad idea.  Indicate you want to buy larger quantities (even if not necessarily true) may get you a better initial quote.  Prices have risen a lot in the past few years, and a lot of premium items in China are no longer cheap, even by Western standards.  Don’t assume that because you’re in China things must be dirt cheap – that’s simply not true anymore.  Also, if you were referred to the store by a friend and the storekeepers know that, you might already be getting a better than average price — driving too hard a bargain may get your friend in trouble and may burn bridges.

4) Walking around before entering the store is almost always a good idea — you get a survey of prices and items and know whether or not what they’re offering is unique or not.  Unique items, be it teaware or tea, will command higher prices, and vendors generally know it and won’t budge much.  If they pressed it themselves, expect higher prices.  Also, just because a store is the “official” distributor of a tea (say, Dayi) doesn’t mean they’ll be cheaper.  In fact, sometimes they might be more expensive because they have a wider range of products and they’re less likely to sell fakes.

5) If you’ve got a few weeks and got to know a few vendors, don’t bother trying to get their opinion on someone else’s tea.  They’re almost invariably going to tell you the tea’s bad.

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Random thoughts in Beijing

July 1, 2011 · 2 Comments

1) I find myself having difficulty brewing tea away from home these days to my satisfaction, mostly because my setup is very specific and quite different from what you find elsewhere.  I’m sure many of us have our quirks in our brewing setup, some more esoteric and specific than others, but generally speaking, the more you change the brewing settings, the harder it is to replicate good results.  When everything ranging from wares to water to the tea itself has changed, the likelihood of success is relatively low.  Note how in tea-brewing competitions, the competitors are often using their own teaware and I think often know what style of tea they’re brewing beforehand, so there’s really not a lot of variable they have to control for.

2) Partly because of the abovementioned difficulty, buying tea away from home is also a difficult thing.  First of all, you are tasting at someone else’s place, and you have no way of trying it out at home, because you’re away from it.  You can’t just take a sample, go home, and try it out.  What you get at the store is likely what you will have to deal with.  Also, you are limited by your luggage space.  I bought 500g of a white tea, and it’s enormous – the tea, because of the way it was processed, has very broad leaves and eat up tonnes of space.  Whereas 500g of compress pu is just one cake, 500g of this white tea is two large bags that fills up my entire backpack.  I wanted more of it, but simply cannot carry more.  I’m going to see if there’s a way for me to get the seller to ship it to me, but that’s a real pain even if I were in China.

3) The Beijing tea markets are getting bigger, and things are getting more expensive.  There have been a few tea malls that are now open that didn’t exist back in 2007, and another brand new one is under construction.  It looks posh, and I’m sure will be filled with finely decorated stores.  This is the other trend – things are getting more expensive here, and there’s no turning back as the country gets richer.  The average restaurant worker in Beijing is earning about 2-3x what they used to when I lived here, and my friend L was complaining to me how he couldn’t find someone willing to help out at his store with an offer of 1,500 RMB a month plus free living space.  Now it seems like the going rate is 1,800.  While that’s still pitifully low for Western standards, it speaks volumes about what people can afford and how much they’re willing to pay.  Prices I’ve heard quoted for old tree puerh raw materials are anywhere from 300-800 RMB/kg, depending on the area.   Prices for new tea, of course, are quite high.

4) One positive from the higher prices is that things are getting prettier, although of course, you have to pay for pretty.  A lot of stores look nicer now, are using nicer wares, and serve you tea in nicer cups.  Packaging for tea is getting better, and even the paper used to wrap puerh cakes are no longer of the toilet paper variety.  It does make for a slightly more pleasant shopping experience, and in the case of teaware, you can find some pretty decent looking wares out there for not a lot of money.  I’m quite tempted by a celadon fairness cup, but I might pass, just because I almost never use fairness cups in the first place.

5) Serious tea makers are getting better at it.  I remember visiting this shop in Maliandao that was run by two brothers in 06/07, and their teas, which they pressed themselves in Yunnan, were decent, but not great.  I went back there today, and the tea I tried were some of the best young puerh I’ve had in quite some time.  The ones who entered the game and stayed in the game are now a few years wiser, and some, like this brother pair, are getting quite good at it.  The tea is expensive, but I think well worth the money, so I shelled out for a few cakes.  I would’ve probably gotten more, if not for the abovementioned limitation of space.

6) Having said that, it’s still quite hard to find anything really decent unless you know already where to look.  Shopping in tea markets is not really for the casual traveler.  There’s a reason, for example, why few locals visit these places, never mind foreigners.  It’s hard looking for good tea when there are literally hundreds of shops all packed inside a two block radius, and it’s only getting harder with more and more tea malls being built.  Sometimes I find things because I get lucky, like this white tea, but sometimes you just have to know where to find it, like this brother shop.  You also need boatloads of time.  I was hoping to find some decent yancha today, but most of the shops I know from back when were either dead, or don’t look too promising.  There are no lack of yancha shops at all — I probably ran into a hundred in the past few days, but I didn’t enter a single one.  Sitting down and tasting tea takes a lot of time, not to mention having to endure all kinds of crap because they’re not to your liking for either price or taste purposes.  Finding good tea takes work.

7) It’s still buyer beware.  This applies to both the end consumer, like us, and also the producers.  Consumers need to be well informed – know what you’re tasting, be able to tell the difference, be able to make good judgment quickly based on one or at most two tastings, and know the prices of things out there.  Producers need to know what they’re doing, and not trust their sources too much.  I’ve heard and also seen enough in the past few days to know that the same stuff that used to happen in 06/07 still goes on today – people having their maocha swapped between purchase and pressing, people thinking they were buying tea from mountain X when it was really tea shipped in from mountain Y, people processing teas in woefully misinformed ways, etc.  Producers, if they’re not careful, can get just as easily screwed as the consumer, except they then pass the cost of the mistakes onto the consumer.  That’s why I generally don’t trust any producer who spends less than 3-4 months a year in Yunnan to be pressing cakes.  Without that kind of time and effort, and not to mention the necessary building of local connections that require constant maintenance, most vendors simply cannot get the tea they think they’re getting.

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Old tea

June 28, 2011 · 5 Comments

I’m in Beijing at the moment, visiting my friend L and drinking tea with his friends.  One of the teas I had today was a mixture of a some bits and pieces from a Mengjing mushroom tea from Republican days, and a good chunk of leaves from a 60s Blue Label iron cake.  While the tea is quite nice and has obvious qi, at the same time I can’t help but think that all the cost of this tea is not necessarily worth it.  After all, at over $100 USD for that brew if you were to pay for it, the tea is nice, but not that nice.  The qi is certainly something you don’t get with younger teas — an aged tea of enough years is going to be different from your young stuff, no matter what.  Yet, I’m really not sure if this is really worth it for a lot of people.  So many people chase this stuff so that now they are priced out of pretty much everyone’s range.  But if you drink it, and compare it to something like say 1960s Guangyungong tea, the difference is not so earth-shatteringly big that it merits the many multiples of price that it commands.

This is really a dilemma not only of aged tea, but all teas in general.  Is that dahongpao that is very good really worth 10x that dahongpao that is only so so?  Sure, perhaps.  At some point, however, every individual will hit a threshold above which they will not go in terms of cost/benefit.  While it is not always a good idea to measure a tea’s worth in how much pleasure it gives you per dollar spent, at some point that does come into play, and at this moment, for me, I think that many of the aged puerh on the market today are simply not worth the amount of money they command for me to want to actually buy them for drinking purposes.  I’m quite happy with my current selection of tea that I possess, and find little compelling reason to chase such expensive teas.  To buy them is to buy something rare and unique, something not easily found, especially if we’re talking about pre-1970s tea.  That rarity, however, commands a huge premium.  The reasons for purchasing these teas quickly leave the realm of “this is a good tea and is tasty” to “this is something that I can use to show off with” or “this is something that displays my knowledge of tea” or something similar.  In my opinion, those are not good things to pay for.  Nor, I think, should we expect that any tea produced today will command a similar level of prices come their 40th or 50th anniversary – the production level is so much higher now than it was back in the day, and so much more care has been put in to preserve these teas, that I think decades from now we will still have a relatively large supply of such things.  The only good reason to buy a tea is because you like to drink it.

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The one that got away

June 15, 2011 · 8 Comments

Today’s tea is probably my last, seriously brewed tea I’ll have in the United States for quite some time.  Tomorrow the movers will be coming to pack my things up and send them on their merry way to Hong Kong.  So, to commemorate the occasion, I thought I should drink something different, something interesting.  After some dithering and going over the many teas I have, I settled on one that has special meaning to me, because it’s the one that got away.

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Back in 2007 when I was still in Taiwan, I was a frequent visitor to the various old teashops in Taipei to look for aged oolong.  At that point I don’t think many people were selling aged oolongs online, aside from a handful at Houde, and there was very little information on such things.  I hunted high and low for these things, good, bad, and everything in between.  It was a fun experience, and I learned a lot just by tasting the different teas and talking to different people who sell them.  One store in particular, as my old-time readers will remember, I affectionately called the “Candy Store” because buying things from there made me felt like a kid in a candy store – lots of goodies, and the thrill of having to hunt them down.

Late in my stay in Taipei, perhaps a week or two before I had to leave, I went to the Candy Store again and found a few things that looked interesting.  One of them was a small, perhaps 2-3kg bag of rolled oolong with a label that said it was from the 80s, a Dongding competition tea.  I only got to try the tea after I left Taiwan, because I had no time to do it before flying out.  By the second or third time I tried the tea, it became obvious that this tea is really good, and I wanted the whole bag.  However, it was too late, and when I asked a friend to visit the store again for this tea, it was all gone.

This is what spurred me to buy in bulk whenever I like a tea now – I think back in the day I felt less confident in my ability to tell good from bad apart, and tended to buy in smaller quantities because of it.  These days, I’m more sure of what I like and don’t like and also my ability in telling good from bad, so when I find something that I think checks all the boxes, I tend to buy in bulk – a few kilos at a time, so that the misfortune of not having a good tea when I want it is no longer there.

What I drank today is the very last bit of this tea, the last of the 4oz that I bought when I first visited the Candy Store.  Drinking it today, there’s still that nice, peachy taste to it, but it had also gotten a darker taste, a more aged flavour, if you will, that wasn’t there when I bought it.

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The tea looks a lot darker, although I think at least part of it is because there was a lot of dust in the bag, and that the cup is much deeper than the one in the original photo from three years ago.  Nevertheless, this is still a great tea, with depth, fullness, and qi.  I wish I have more, but I don’t.  It was one of the first teas I drank after coming back to the US from my long sojourn in Asia during 2006-7, and it is the last serious tea I’m drinking before I fly back to Asia, ending almost fifteen years in North America.  The next two days I’ll have to subsist on grandpa style teas, and then, back to home base.  See you on the other side.

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Packing and shipping

June 13, 2011 · 9 Comments

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One of the most painful things about moving is packing up everything.  What you see here, alas, is only a fraction of what I have.  Teaware, as we all know, are fragile, breakable things.  Pots, cups, dishes, kettles, everything is breakable, and everything needs a lot of wrapping.  I find that a lot of it is really difficult to do right, and sometimes people who pack and then ship these things don’t do it properly, resulting in breakage.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is to pack a teapot with the lid on the pot itself and just wrap the whole thing with bubble wrap.  That’s dangerous.  The lid, while it sits on the pot, can easily be rattled in shipment and comes loose or, worse, get damaged, as happened to one of my pots.  One of the pots I bought recently was shipped to me with only a little tape holding the lid onto the body.  Of course, when I opened the box, the lid was loose.  I was really lucky it wasn’t in pieces.

There’s also the issue of cushioning.  Ideally, you want space between all pieces of stuff — some sort of buffer in between each and every piece, so they never touch during shipment and will never come into contact with hard surface.  They also need to be cushioned against impacts along the walls of the box, so there needs to be space there too.  Boxes that are too small are disasters waiting to happen.

Shipping metal is no less difficult.  While tetsubins are pretty hardy and can take a lot of abuse, things like tin, pewter, copper, or silver are much more fragile and will dent or scratch easily.  With these, you have to be extra sure that the cushioning is enough to support all kinds of blows to the box — especially since some of these are heavy and if they are allowed to shift in the box, the momentum will create a greater force to dent what’s next to it.  I’d suggest shipping them singly, if possible, or if one must ship them together with something else, do so in a way that minimizes the chances of breakage with the way you place different items, etc.

Teas are easier to deal with, especially if they’re of the oolong variety and come in bags.  That’s almost a no brainer, so long as the box itself is relatively air tight and (hopefully) won’t be exposed to high temperature or sunlight.  Puerh cakes are a bit of a pain, but generally speaking when I ship these things I almost expect damage — it’s just part of the cost of shipping them.  Broken edges, roughed up wrappers, and missing teadust are par for the course.  If they’re not flooded I’m happy.

What’s really difficult is deciding to get rid of some pieces.  I have a lot of teaware that I think I should probably cull from my collection, either because I no longer use them at all, or in many cases, never really used them in the first place.  In this picture alone I see three pieces that I never use and I should probably get rid of, but I have a hard time bringing myself to do it.  On one level, I’m a hoarder at heart, so I want to hold onto them.  I also feel, somehow, that selling these things is not quite right.  I sometimes gift items away, but you can only gift so many things, and not a lot of people take tea related gifts, in any case.  Sometimes they’re also pieces that I don’t deem gift-worthy — if I’m not going to use it, why should I inflict it on someone else?  Then there are the tuition pieces.  At some point I’m going to take pictures of all of them and then show them here, so that others can learn from my tuition mistakes, but those pieces I’m sort of stuck with forever, and all I really need to the resolve to throw them in the trash.  All in all, the problem of too much teaware is really a dilemma that has no good resolution.

Categories: Misc
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