A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘shopping’

Leaf Tea Boutique

October 28, 2011 · 11 Comments

Last night I visited Leaf Tea Boutique with MadameN.  We were there for a small art exhibit, and the proprietor of the place, who was also the host of the event, also decided to make it a tea tasting. I’ve walked by this store a number of times before, never bothering to go in as it looks, from the street level anyway, to be just another tea shop, situated in Central in an area frequented by foreign tourists and expats, which means, at least for me, that it probably sells uninteresting teas. When I arrived at the place I was a little confused – where was this art going to be had? This being Hong Kong, space is a real premium, and I couldn’t see any space for any art, until, of course, the staff directed us to go downstairs – turns out they have a little space in the basement that is normally used for seats and has been converted into a little gallery.

In Hong Kong, despite its tea guzzling culture, there are very, very few places where you can actually sit down and drink tea. While plenty of places sell tea, and some will brew for you if you want to try something out, if you want to just buy a cup or a pot of tea to drink, or if you (god forbid) want to bring your own leaves to brew, you’re fresh out of luck. There was one place in Causeway Bay that did that in a Chinese setting, but that store is long dead.  For those who need tea in Central or any other place, for that matter, your only solution is to go to Starbucks, Pacific Coffee, or any number of hotel cafes and the like for a cup of bland and overpriced teabag tea. Leaf Tea Boutique, therefore, is a nice, welcomed addition, and as you can buy a cup to go or for on-premises consumption, that’s a much better alternative for those of us teaheads who need a caffeine fix but don’t want yet another Harney teabag.

Of course, drinking tea in a basement doesn’t sound too exciting, but it also offers something that a lot of places in Hong Kong lacks – peace and quiet. You can’t hear the hustle and bustle at all from their basement, which is quite nice.

There are a number of teas on the menu there, and the proprietor lined up ten teas for us to try in succession. It was slightly wasteful, as we only got to drink one cup out of every brew, but it did allow us to sample more of their teas. As is typical in a tasting, we went from green to black (I skipped the mint tea at the end). Some, such as the sencha and the tieguanyin are merely ok, while others, like the baimudan (white peony) is quite nice. They only offer one of every type of tea, and give very little information on the tea itself, which I understand may turn off some people, but given their business model, location, and potential customer base, that’s not such a bad thing.  The young puerh that we had is probably in the 5 year range, seemingly a blend with a bit of smoke leftover.  I think it’s a big factory production, although it’s not quite clear, and I didn’t ask to look. I don’t like to be too inquisitive the first time I visit a store.

I just noticed that they have a flat pricing structure – which may explain the quality levels I found in the teas. Finding a decent baimudan that sells for $25 USD per 100g is pretty easy. Finding a good tieguanyin for the same price is considerably harder. You’ll never find anything near a top flight longjing at that price.

All in all, it’s a nice place, and a welcomed addition to the general availability of teas here in Hong Kong in a different format. For the general public and even those of us who just want a decent cup of tea while in the city doing other things, it’s not a bad place to go.

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Frenzied development

July 19, 2011 · 1 Comment

Pretty much every day now you can open the newspapers (or more likely, a news website) and some story about China’s economic development will pop up.  The rise of China as an economic power that people actually pay attention to is something quite remarkable, and every time I go back and visit I can see it on the ground.  Maliandao, which I discussed five years ago when I first got there and updated last year, is no longer the backwater shopping street it used to be.  Two new roads have opened onto Maliandao, and traffic is worse than ever.  There are many, many more buildings in the vicinity now.  If we go back to the updated map:

Now I can give you some pictures to match up with the colours.  This is the building in purple on top

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The one on the left anyway.  That was a pile of dirt, basically, when I was there in 06/07, and was just beginning to get some building going on.  Now it’s a full blown tea mall with an apartment building on top.  The building on the right in the picture is what used to be the Pu’er Chadu, which is now defunct.  This picture was taken from the vantage point of the big Maliandao Tea City mall

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Which is the same as always.  Don’t go if you’re a tourist — it has the worst prices.  Although, because a number of stores there are older, if you’re looking for Beijing stored tea, you might get lucky there.  Just don’t expect a good deal.

The big pink thing on the map on the right hand side is this:

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Another big apartment building with teashops underneath.  There are two levels of this, all open to the street, and some have nice teas.  I bought my big bag of white tea there.  Next to this building is another building that has always been at Maliandao, but only recently started selling tea:

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The building underneath the blue sign was, and still is, mostly a audiophile/camera mall, but the ground and second floor are now teashops.  Nothing too impressive there except a few things of interest, but that’s only after a quick walkaround.  Behind it is Tianfuyuan, the big brown box on the map on the right, and where Xiaomei’s shop is located.

Underneath all this ritzy development though is still the same old infrastructure that supplies the stores.  Witness, for example, this:

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Among all the new cars and shiny objects are still the labourers who work hard to make the place function — here are two cart drivers who are carrying empty (left) and full (right) jugs of water for the shops in the area.  Note how the carts have an electric motor. Many of the shopkeepers still live in, or above, the stores, and many of them are still earning a paltry sum, although a paltry sum now is closer to 1600 RMB a month, rather than the 600 RMB a month of four or five years ago.  In fact, my friend L has been trying to hire someone but has found no takers for 1500 RMB.

Construction is still continuing, with a new tea mall slated to open probably later this year, and targeted at a more upmarket crowd.  The place has nicer decor and looks to be quite posh.  I’m sure you can find high prices there, along with prettier sales girls and more comfortable surroundings.  On the other hand, I also heard that a subway line will open in the next few years that will take you to Maliandao, which will make life a lot easier.  Either way, it’s fascinating to see all the changes in the past few years — and it looks like it’s going to keep going.

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The retaste project

July 8, 2011 · 6 Comments

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This is the sum of the teas I have here in Hong Kong, minus a few things already in the cupboard that I didn’t bother taking out for this picture.  Almost everything here was purchased a few years ago while I was working in China and then Taiwan.  Many of those things were bought when I was still very much in the experimentation phase, and during much of the time coincided with a lot of what was going on with the puerh bubble of 06/07.  Many of these teas were chronicled on this very blog back then, with a blow by blow account of how I bought them and what I thought at the time.  I think it will be an interesting thing to do to go back to every single one of these teas and see where they are now, five years later after some regular, Hong Kong dry storage at home.

I’m pretty sure that when I drink some of these now I’ll think they are terrible.  In fact, some of them I knew were terrible even back then.  I guess this can at least put the theory of “bad teas will age into something better” to a test for a 4-5 year time frame.  Let’s see where this goes.

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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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Buying things on eBay

April 12, 2011 · 9 Comments

eBay, the great American fleamarket, is both a source of frustration as well as a source of treasure.  I recently found this

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Which I basically bought for a song.  These things routinely sell for $100 or more in antique shops, and I got it for $35, which I think is quite a deal, especially considering it is quite pristine in condition.  However, most of the time, it’s hard to find things like this.  Over the years I’ve gotten a few good things from eBay, in terms of teaware — a few cups, an old gaiwan, a tetsubin, and other oddities.  That, however, is only possible after many hours of trolling on the site, looking for bargains.  I think in general, when looking for antique teaware on eBay, there are three categories of goods. (I am not talking about new things, like a cheap new gaiwan, or things like teas, which are a different matter)

1) The obviously nice stuff. These are things that are obviously good, old, and nice.  They are also watched by many, and are rarely cheap.  Older Yixing pots, for example, fall into this category.  There is a big group of very (and sometimes less) knowledgeable collectors on eBay who will buy any and all antique Yixing pots.  Those pewter wrapped ones, for example, routinely end at over $1,000, and the same can be said for anything that looks like they are the real deal from the Qing or the Republic.  There are no bargains to be had here.

2) The fake. This is the vast majority of stuff on eBay when it comes to older teaware.  They are fake, and most of the time, obviously so.  Stores like 5000friends, for example, have an endless supply of “Qing” and “Republic” pots that I’m sure are fake, and 5000friends is definitely one of the better fake vendors, when compared with the other, worse fake vendors.  Basically, for Yixing for example, if the stuff is coming directly from China, you can assume it’s fake, because there is no good reason why the person will put it on eBay if it is real — it is far easier and better to sell within China if you have a genuinely old Yixing pot than if you sell it on eBay.  It just doesn’t make any sense.

3) The hidden treasures.  This is where the bargains are, but it comes at a price.  They are only bargains because they are usually poorly described and has few or no pictures.  This pot above, for example, only had one picture on the site.  In other words, I was gambling that the pot is indeed in pristine condition and that the other side looks ok, which it turned out to be, but there was no guarantee (and I think why it had no bids).  This is getting increasingly rare, but sometimes you see a fuzzy picture and that’s all you’ve got to rely on, or if the title is mistyped, or if the person doesn’t know what they’re selling — for example, describing a Yixing pot as a children’s toy because it’s so small.  Even then, there will be other treasure hunters out there doing the same thing you are, which is scouring through these listings looking for good stuff, but once in a while, you can find cheap things and you’ll get lucky, just like any real life flea market.

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Antique roadshow

April 5, 2011 · 5 Comments

Living in the part of the US that I do, hitting antique shops sometimes yield some decent loot.

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This isn’t anything too special, just some Republican period export ware.  Nevertheless, it’s not a bad find, since it’s not expensive and is still in pretty good condition.  There was a better one last year that I passed up, and which I forever regret, but alas, can’t buy them all.

These pots are usually big.  They’re very impractical for making tea the usual way, so I tend to use them for half-grandpa brewing — leaves in a pot with renewed water whenever I feel like it.  This is usually done to squeeze the last bits out of somewhat spent leaves, and it works pretty well.

Edit: I should also note that pots like these seem to err on the low-fired side of things.  You almost never see the really high fired, close to glossy finish that is so common on new pots.  I wonder if that’s deliberate, or accidental because they couldn’t get the heat up as high as modern electric kilns can.

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Going lower and lower

March 24, 2011 · 7 Comments

One of the peculiar things about my tea shopping habits over the past few years is that I have been buying cheaper and cheaper teas.  I am quite literally paying less money overall for the tea I am buying, and on a per gram basis, I am definitely paying far less than I used to a few years ago.

I think tea shopping, in general, falls into two categories.  There are the teas that are for general consumption — stuff you drink regularly because they’re good, and then there’s the special stuff, teas that you bring out when you have tea friends coming over, or when you feel like you want a special treat.  What these things mean, however, depend on the person.  I find that the gap between my “daily” tea and my “treat” tea is quite slim, and I find very little difference between them.  I have a few things that are old and aged and expensive, but I find very few reasons to drink them.  I don’t even have much of an urge, for example, to dig into my cake of Traditional Character.  It just doesn’t excite me enough to do so.

There is, actually, a lot of tea out there — far more than anyone of us can consume in many lifetimes.  Whenever a vendor tells you something is “rare” or “exceptional” or what not, chances are whoever is reselling the tea (usually on the internet) bought it from someone who has a virtually unlimited supply of the tea.  I just had a great tieguanyin the other day that I thought was complex, deep, and well balanced, and it was quite cheap for the quality.  I’d be more than happy to drink it every day.  In fact, it has revived my interest in tieguanyin, because I can see that good ones still exist and they don’t all have to be nuclear green.  Yet, there’s no story to this tea, no “I got this from farmer X who did Y to get this tea”.  It’s a blended, roasted tieguanyin, made year after year by this teashop, sold to locals who got accustomed to the taste and will refill their jars when they run out.  For a lot of people who live far from a tea producing country, this is definitely a luxury, but the internet should make it easier to acquire such things.  Unfortunately, that is not the case.  Cheaper teas online tend to be very bad, and the expensive things are often not a lot better.  Things priced as “treat” are often just slightly higher grade “daily tea”, especially when it’s attached to some story, which is pretty unacceptable.  I’m pretty sure that the loose puerh that some of these stores sell can beat any loose puerh sold online these days, but alas, nobody can find them.

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