I don’t buy as much tea as I did in my peak years.. But last year bought a few cakes of 2008 Dayi 8582 off of taobao. I also had a local tea friend traveling home to Malaysia buy a few cakes of 2008 7542 when he was there. In the case of the 8582,…| teadb.org
Five more Things I like & dislike.| teadb
I don’t buy as much tea as I did in my peak years.. But last year bought a few cakes of 2008 Dayi 8582 off of taobao. I also had a local tea friend traveling home to Malaysia buy a few cakes of 2008 7542 when he was there. In the case of the 8582, I’ve always liked the recipe and the tea meets a lot of my drinking criteria. And 7542 is classic.. But why now? As those that follow pu’erh know, Dayi prices have been falling. The past couple years have been a particularly good opportunity t...| teadb
A new TW-based vendor popped up out of the Tea Table Discord, named Quiche Teas. You’ll notice that their prices are quite low, especially when put against other western facing vendors. This is because Quiche is dropshipping primarily from a Taizhong based vendor named Taishunhe with a relatively low markup. While dropshipping can sometimes be a negative term, in this case it is technically accurate and I definitely appreciate how transparent Quiche is about his sourcing. There is no preten...| teadb
Sorry to all the people who like the drinking reports. 2017 has been sparse. This tasting is composed of a few teas that piqued my interest, affordable, semi-aged teas from Guangdong based Taobao Vendor MX-Tea. For this group of teas, I invited my local tea friend Garrett to join in. Garrett has a similar tea diet to myself, principally drinking traditionally stored pu’erh, semi-aged pu’erh as well as the occasional aged oolong. I’ve ordered tea from MX Tea a few times over the past fe...| teadb
What Would An Ideal Tea Day Actually Look Like For You? What About An Ideal Tea Day For A Regular, Routine Day? For my first decade of tea drinking this is a question I never really asked myself. I suspect I’m not the only one. An ideal tea day does not mean narrowing it down […]| teadb
Like with all of my projects, this is a work in progress. You can also see from the image below that the dashboard view on our blog is a bit wonky.| teadb
As usual with these reports, even the most massive ones, there were a lot of late arrivals that didn’t meet my publish date. Having exhausted pretty much every thought I’ve had on Xiaguan in the past report I wasn’t quite sure what to do with a few of the late arriving Xiaguans. But I wanted to do something for these teas, so here’s a small addendum with notes.| teadb
Help identify this cake (generic Zhongcha wrapper). Help me with my order from White2Tea/Yunnan Sourcing/TWL? What’s a genuine pu’erh source? What pu’erh should I try?| teadb
The first tea of the month reports I’ve done since re-establishing the blog was the Xiaguan Masochists tea of the month report. This essentially meant drinking a lot of Xiaguan teas that are laying around and trying to measure them against one another. Evaluating teas you haven’t tried much against other one another is much more difficult than trying to compare a tea with a tea you know very well. This is a why having solid benchmarks is helpful. In this case, one tea I’ve used as a ben...| teadb
Young pu and now factory tea. Aren’t you the guy that published that super-negative Xiaguan report. At least young pu’erh is popular in our western pu’erh community. Who the hell is talking about factory tea in the west? Other than the odd cake here or there, or a LP/Toby group buy most of our pu’erh drinkers are chugging White2Tea, Bitter Leaf, Yunnan Sourcing, Essence of Tea, Crimson Lotus, etc. Then we have another collection of drinkers buying up Yangqing Hao and Wistaria. Factor...| teadb
There is a film studio in Japan called Toei. They’re not the most well known Japanese studio but they’re reasonably large and have been around for 75 years. In the 60s and 70s they specialized in making B-Movies and were heavily associated with the Jitsuroku era of Yakuza films (most famously Kinji Fukasaku’s Battles Without Honor or Humanity). These are abrasive, subversive films filled with anti-heroes who replaced the classical, heroic yakuza from a few years before. These Jitsuroku ...| teadb
After such wonderful raw pu’erhs in previous months, why subject yourself to lowly factory tea. Believe me. I asked these questions many times. So why do it? (a) I really need to do a stash check and determine how these teas really are. (b) I’ve made alot of mistakes in buying pu’erh, wasting both space and money. Many of these were my tuition, and I think it can be an illuminating exercise to look back and reflect. If you’re only interested in my opinion on young or old premium tea...| teadb
There are a lot of ways to categorize pu’erh. On a very basic level there are raw and ripe. You can also categorize it by age, storage, area, etc.. One very old school way that I rarely but sometimes see mentioned is categorizing raw pu’erh by two very old eras of tea. The old and the very old, Yinji and Haoji..| teadb
In the pu’erh world there’s three major prefectures in Yunnan that make pu’erh tea, Xishuangbanna, Simao (pu’erh), and Lincang. These do not necessarily get proportionate coverage. It’s hard to argue there’s not a heavy Xishuangbanna bias when it comes to the dialog in the pu’erh scene. I’d admit that TeaDB by extension of my own habits has a significant lean towards the southern prefecture, Xishuangbanna. Banna contains two heavy-hitting regions in Menghai county and Mengla c...| teadb
To the casuals, pumidors are intimidating.. They’re not something anyone really wants to jump into quickly. For seasoned pu’erh folk, one feature of using a pumidor to store tea is that it tends to scale fairly well if you can get the right size container for your stash. The maintenance and monitoring can be appealing.. But for most normie tea people all the hoops they see people jumping through in pu’erh storage create a significant barrier to entry. But there’s no reason to go pumid...| teadb
This has easily been the weirdest year I’ve been alive. Living in a global pandemic has not just shifted our regular routines and status quo, it has completely destroyed them. Denny and I worked from home before the pandemic and on any sort of ranking of people impacted by the pandemic, we would both rank quite low.. Even still it is a very different world for us as well as our tea drinking has had a powerful impact. Here’s a few personal reflections on tea during this pandemic.| teadb
(un)wise words: If you’re comfortable in your living environment, pu’erh will also age well in that environment.| TeaDB
Five things I like & dislike COVID19 Edition…| TeaDB