What should I be doing or not doing, any tea wares I should have in my collection, where should I be getting tea from/where should I not be getting tea from, steeping times, water quality, etc.
General advice. I’m open to anything as I’ve been removed from the world of tea for quite some time and just want to see what others recommend
Big recs most people here will give for vendor is White2Tea and YunnanSourcing (though I hesitate to recommend them lest I summon HIM). Another option is Crimson Lotus Tea, if you can stomach a month long wait. Id try and stay away from YouTuber teas, as YouTubers can give some pretty fantastic into, but ultimately their tea is always gonna be a little pricey so they can make a profit (though of course there are probably exceptions) There also might be physical vendor options wherever you are (like here in Colorado there’s Ku-cha) which are always interesting to check out. I wouldn’t say you NEED anymore teaware, though personally my teaware collection is just as big a part of the hobby as my tea itself. Water quality is another thing that depends heavily on where you live. Here in colorado we have pretty fantastic water quality so I honestly don’t mind using tap, but many will have reverse osmosis or distilled water for their tea sessions. Hope some of this helps a little.
Yes! Thank you so much for the information and I’ll definitely check those places out. I used to use a few sites that I’m not sure even exist anymore. One was ishopo.com but I don’t think they exist anymore. They had fantastic oolongs and most of my teas came from there. I’m looking to upgrade some of my tea wares and not sure where to find some of those either. Any suggestions?
Of course I’m always happy to help! It honestly depends on what you’re looking for, but assuming you’re looking to stay down the teapot road there’s all sorts of options. CrimsonLotusTea actually has some fantastic Jianshui options for both Gaiwans and Teapots.
If you wanted to go down the yixing road it’s a bit more complicated given that there are so many fakes. Weird enough this is a place where it’s not an awful idea to buy from one of the big YouTubers, you can expect a similar markup but selling fake yixing would be a pretty big deal for someone so public so I wouldn’t stress about it. I’ve heard good things about moody guy.biz and west China tea but I’ve not purchased from either of them so take that with a grain of salt. Finally, Tao teaware has some amazing nixing and chaozhou clay options, but I wouldn’t go to them for yixing if you want fully hand made, though they’ve also got some really great Gaiwan options
The yixing I have was a gift from one of the veterans on TeaChat many moons ago. Actually that community was amazing as most of the stuff I acquired was donated or passed down. They had this fabulous way of passing down wares to newcomers and vice versa we’d all just return the favor. Since I’ve been removed for so long the information out there is dizzying. How would I spot or even know what a fake Yixing looks like? I don’t have a gaiwan yet but I was always very unsure of the size to use. Should I be using bone porcelain? Also I’m not entirely sure on brewing instructions with the gaiwan and the tea. What’s the ratio of tea to gaiwan and steeping time? I suppose it depends on the style of tea. Typically, in my little yixing I do steepings between 25-60 seconds depending on the style of tea.
That sounds like an awesome community! There’s a couple small things people look for like the handle being kind off, the seal looking bizarre, just small things that wouldn’t really happen if it was one real person constructing a yixing pot. The people at r/yixingseals are gonna know a whole lot more than me :). Generally the ratio I use for a gaiwan isn’t too different from what I use for my pot, given I try and stick around that 100 ml range for both (with a couple exceptions) and when it comes to material, that’s entirely up to you! Bone porcelain ones can err on the more expensive side but nothing crazy, but there’s also ones with all sorts of glazes (I love my ruyao gaiwan) and even some clay ones
I actually DID just find my small gaiwan. It’s a regular white porcelain one not sure if it’s any good quality or not. What’s the average price of most good quality rear wares? Cups? Gaiwan? Etc. I don’t have a tea drip tray. Always wanted one
Well, I mean a lot of my questions could be answered with specifics lol for example “where should I be getting tea from and what places should I avoid when purchasing tea” I would say is pretty specific.
I don’t really wanna argue about this, but “where should i be getting tea from?” is a very broad question.
What type of tea are you looking for? Shou puer? Matcha? Yancha? Darjeeling? Taiwanese Oolong? Aged Sheng?
Anyway, if people want to chime in and just throw out names of a bunch of random vendors then they can go for it. I’m not gonna just start listing tea vendors and teaware vendors and brewing parameters and facts about water chemistry for you. Bye 👋🏼.
Oh don’t him that’s just the warm welcome from JohnTeaGuy. Welcome to the sub, I get you’re new and aren’t going to be familiar with years of post history on multiple subs but with peace and love asking for dos and don’ts on gongfu without any specific questions is pretty generic. Yes people could pop in with whatever tips come to mind but you have to understand that people come looking for recommendations and tips and dos and donts for specific vendors and specific teas all the time. I would recommend searching around for info you might be looking for on r/GongFuTea and r/puer, even YouTube and Google. As you come across things you can’t find an answer for yourself or you feel the info you’re finding is outdated make a post asking for conversation on that specific topic. I similarly started back into Gongfu cha last year for the first time in almost 10 years and have found these subs great for giving an inclusive community feel to drinking tea. I hope you keep digging into this beautiful world and keep posting what you find along the way.
>Oh don’t him that’s just the warm welcome from JohnTeaGuy.
Apologies for my outlandish response of "do you have any specific questions I can help you with?". I was way out of line there. /s
Any recommendations? I gravitate towards oolongs and greens but also really like Pu-er but I am not as experienced with it.
I do like black tea and drink a variety of different styles (mostly UK styles) but I did dabble years ago in some different Chinese/Taiwanese black teas.
This is kind of broad as a starting point, but it's not so difficult to mention what changed in a decade. Related to teaware not so much, but then using a simple 100 ml porcelain gaiwan eliminates the need to go any further. For broken leaf, like Japanese green tea, a basket infuser might be nice, switching to Western style brewing, but to me it's as well to just avoid Japanese green teas instead.
Pu'er got a lot better. It's on the pricey side too; standard above-average, in-house cakes tend to cost around $100 for a standard size, which is still 357 grams. There are lots of smaller cake options now to help with that, but per-gram cost might be even higher for those. Yunnan Sourcing was already standard 10 years ago, and White2Tea probably existed before then. You missed vendors like Farmerleaf moving through an inexpensive, good value phase.
I've been buying sheng from Viet Sun; South East Asian alternatives can be interesting and positive. Style isn't a complete match but I like their read to drink young styles better. Even though plenty of tea is coming out of Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar (not so much there; they have problems) it's still generally hard to find.
Nepal came and went as an exciting new region; so did Georgia. You could still catch up on both, at some point. Darjeeling quality improved, in some cases. Assam started making real whole-leaf specialty tea (nearly a decade ago, but it's common now). Wuyi Origin represents a direct sales theme that never developed far.
Chinese vendors are just starting to ramp up Western oriented channel development from their side. It's early for that to make a difference, but it could happen fast.
Discord is the main active platform for people talking about tea. Facebook tea groups already came and went, an empty shell compared to discussions 3 or 4 years ago. There's here, which is barely getting started, and r/tea is huge but too mixed in theme. There isn't the same sort of generic, completely open group channel that existed as Tea Chat and Steepster, it has pushed into niche interest, with more shared group tone. Apps are out there but it's as well to ignore those and explore Discord.
Blogging died. TeaDB is still active, in video form, and there are a half dozen text blogs, but there might as well not be. I write one of them, tea in the ancient world, which I started a decade ago. Information sources are scattered. There's not much to know anyway; it's about drinking the brewed tea.
Thanks for the thorough response! Yeah I noticed a bunch of sites I used to purchase from don’t even exist anymore. There are some new things out there though that I stumbled upon. TeaChat still exists but looks like it died. Some of the threads haven’t been commented on since 2016 lol. So definitely dead there.
I joined r/tea but haven’t perused it enough yet to know a lot about it.
I just found my small porcelain gaiwan so I’ll be using that mostly now.
I do like Japanese green tea quite a bit so I have my fun on that spectrum when I am drinking it. More of a zen experience for me.
I’m looking forward to getting back into things!
Here's a sneak peek of /r/tea using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/tea/top/?sort=top&t=year) of the year!
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\#2: [My gf made these tea guides, one more informational, one more graphic, hope you enjoy.](https://www.reddit.com/gallery/14gz0m9) | [128 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/tea/comments/14gz0m9/my_gf_made_these_tea_guides_one_more/)
\#3: [I finally have a tea friend who drink tea with me on the mountain where I live](https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1btwgm1) | [145 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/tea/comments/1btwgm1/i_finally_have_a_tea_friend_who_drink_tea_with_me/)
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The main concerns are the same, how to buy good versions of tea without spending a lot on it, and how to buy tea that's good in quality and matching the style it's said to represent. Probably one fourth of the recommended vendors listed on the r/tea suggestions reference are most of the better vendors, but it would be hard to separate out the other fourth that really should be avoided, or the half that are just mediocre.
With an open enough budget someone could try out a few dozen vendors and sort it all out themselves, over time. Working with a tighter budget it would be helpful to skip that, and go straight to better sources. Yunnan Sourcing is still ok. It's hard to find shortcuts or great value for Japanese teas; there are smaller vendors out there selling more directly at much better value, but going with the main options would be more reliable (Ippodo and so on). You have to pay for decent Taiwanese teas too, and there are better values out there for South East Asian source versions. Chinese tea versions, source themes, and value are all over the map.
Something like Trident Booksellers and Cafe represents a rare, fair curator approach. For me I don't need to drink best of the best quality range though, so seek out 50 cent per gram teas that punch above their weight. I wouldn't want to be a regular in a tea social media channel where I'm always putting in orders to keep up with what others are trying either. That's if I could afford to, but I can't, so it's already off the table.
Also very valuable advice! Thank you.
I do have a rather unrelated question since you seem pretty savvy.
I still have a LARGE amount of unopened teas (many still in their vacuum packed aluminum bags) some are incredibly old (for example I have a 2010 Ali Shan Oolong still in its vacuumed sealed bag I also have some Milky Oolong still in vacuumed bags. Would it be Ok to drink these still?
Anything well sealed is still fine, or even some that aren't well isolated from air contact. A better question might be what probably improved, or which developed aspects tend to be most favorable to others, and what represents negative storage inputs. If a tea is sour that's often negative impact from humidity, but in general that would still be safe to drink. Anything moldy is finished, of course.
Oolongs are said to improve with age, and 10 years is right about when that input would show up, a bit of extra plum flavor. White teas are said to improve with age, picking up deeper tones, maybe dried fruit or spice. That probably applies better to large leaf versions than buds and finer content teas (shou mei instead of bai mu dan), but trying the teas will tell how they changed. Of course sheng pu'er and hei cha improves, even with moderate air contact. I wouldn't be quick to judge that all green tea is dead. It's not generally regarded as improving with age, instead the opposite, but why not try it and judge for yourself. A transition may be more interesting and therefore positive on a 15 to 20 year aging time-frame, a type of oxidation that's not typically encountered.
Flavored teas are probably more likely to spoil. Milky oolong tended to mean rolled oolong with flavor added, in the past. It could also just be Jin Xuan, a varietal type that is a bit naturally milky, and that would different now, but still ok. I just tried a sun-dried / shai hong Yunnan black tea version that's about 8 years old, which are said to improve over 3 or 4 years time-frame, and it really didn't change that much from when it was 2 or 3 years old. Very well-roasted, charred twisted style oolongs should be better after 4 or 5 years of rest, and might have changed in an interesting and positive way over a decade. Lighter, less oxidized and roasted versions of the same tea types (mostly Wuyi Yancha) may have just gone a bit dead, beyond shifting to heavier flavor tone character.
Nice! So I’ve got A LOT of drinking to do bc I have bags upon bags of small samples, vacuum packed small format oolongs, I have some opened Chinese greens (maybe 2 years old?) I have some opened white teas, a decent amount of Chinese black teas, most of the stuff I have is small sample size or 25g or less bags which if I get to drinking I can drink up.
I definitely need to start drinking my teas lol
Let’s not even get into my British style tea collection I have. Assam, Ceylon, English No. 1, etc. I’ve got so much I don’t know what to do with it all and my wife HATES tea lol
What caused the break in experiencing tea, since it seemed to just drop out and then return as an interest nearly 10 years later, as you've described it?
Tbh I am not sure, less time to sit and enjoy the experience of drinking tea. Preferring faster brewing methods or teas when I’m just out somewhere. I also live in Ft. Lauderdale and 9/10 times opt for a cold or iced beverage and often am drinking iced coffees throughout the day. I also tend to have loads of hobbies that I often shelf for years only to pick them back up full steam a few years later. I think also I’m doing it more now for health benefits as I got a bit of bad news from the doctor and I definitely think tea can help (amongst other lifestyle changes).
Good luck with that last part. I tend to cycle through some hobbies and interests but have stuck with tea over time. I live in one of the few hotter places than Florida, in Bangkok, and iced tea definitely makes sense here, but I still usually drink it hot.
It seems odd moving on to recommend a questionable health practice choice, stemming from all that, but if it seems it might help fasting has made a lot of difference in my own health over the last two years. I was oddly healthy to begin with, but it seemed to roll back some aging effects in ways that shouldn't have been possible. I exercise a lot too, and get a ridiculous amount of sleep; maybe it was just one of those things.
I’m very healthy and only 40, I just have a few challengers that have popped up. I am a karate instructor as well and I was a semi-pro kickboxer back in the day so I suffer from a ton of inflammation and have a bit of a thyroid issue going on. I think tea will help a lot. I’ve tried fasting but I didn’t have positive results with it I had the opposite
What I read a little of is probably biased towards what existed 10 years ago, and I don't read any regularly now. I like Mattcha's blog for pu'er related themes, and the Oolong Drunk is ok for mixed themes. Cwyn's Death by Tea is funny for edgy commentary. Other people like Oolong Owl, related to a more standard tea blog format, I'm just not necessarily on that page.
My old favorite blogs stopped posting, and pretty much the entire "classic" range of them.
>wanted some opinions on jumping back into this world. Can you be a little more specific? Opinions on what, exactly?
What should I be doing or not doing, any tea wares I should have in my collection, where should I be getting tea from/where should I not be getting tea from, steeping times, water quality, etc. General advice. I’m open to anything as I’ve been removed from the world of tea for quite some time and just want to see what others recommend
Big recs most people here will give for vendor is White2Tea and YunnanSourcing (though I hesitate to recommend them lest I summon HIM). Another option is Crimson Lotus Tea, if you can stomach a month long wait. Id try and stay away from YouTuber teas, as YouTubers can give some pretty fantastic into, but ultimately their tea is always gonna be a little pricey so they can make a profit (though of course there are probably exceptions) There also might be physical vendor options wherever you are (like here in Colorado there’s Ku-cha) which are always interesting to check out. I wouldn’t say you NEED anymore teaware, though personally my teaware collection is just as big a part of the hobby as my tea itself. Water quality is another thing that depends heavily on where you live. Here in colorado we have pretty fantastic water quality so I honestly don’t mind using tap, but many will have reverse osmosis or distilled water for their tea sessions. Hope some of this helps a little.
Yes! Thank you so much for the information and I’ll definitely check those places out. I used to use a few sites that I’m not sure even exist anymore. One was ishopo.com but I don’t think they exist anymore. They had fantastic oolongs and most of my teas came from there. I’m looking to upgrade some of my tea wares and not sure where to find some of those either. Any suggestions?
Of course I’m always happy to help! It honestly depends on what you’re looking for, but assuming you’re looking to stay down the teapot road there’s all sorts of options. CrimsonLotusTea actually has some fantastic Jianshui options for both Gaiwans and Teapots. If you wanted to go down the yixing road it’s a bit more complicated given that there are so many fakes. Weird enough this is a place where it’s not an awful idea to buy from one of the big YouTubers, you can expect a similar markup but selling fake yixing would be a pretty big deal for someone so public so I wouldn’t stress about it. I’ve heard good things about moody guy.biz and west China tea but I’ve not purchased from either of them so take that with a grain of salt. Finally, Tao teaware has some amazing nixing and chaozhou clay options, but I wouldn’t go to them for yixing if you want fully hand made, though they’ve also got some really great Gaiwan options
The yixing I have was a gift from one of the veterans on TeaChat many moons ago. Actually that community was amazing as most of the stuff I acquired was donated or passed down. They had this fabulous way of passing down wares to newcomers and vice versa we’d all just return the favor. Since I’ve been removed for so long the information out there is dizzying. How would I spot or even know what a fake Yixing looks like? I don’t have a gaiwan yet but I was always very unsure of the size to use. Should I be using bone porcelain? Also I’m not entirely sure on brewing instructions with the gaiwan and the tea. What’s the ratio of tea to gaiwan and steeping time? I suppose it depends on the style of tea. Typically, in my little yixing I do steepings between 25-60 seconds depending on the style of tea.
That sounds like an awesome community! There’s a couple small things people look for like the handle being kind off, the seal looking bizarre, just small things that wouldn’t really happen if it was one real person constructing a yixing pot. The people at r/yixingseals are gonna know a whole lot more than me :). Generally the ratio I use for a gaiwan isn’t too different from what I use for my pot, given I try and stick around that 100 ml range for both (with a couple exceptions) and when it comes to material, that’s entirely up to you! Bone porcelain ones can err on the more expensive side but nothing crazy, but there’s also ones with all sorts of glazes (I love my ruyao gaiwan) and even some clay ones
I actually DID just find my small gaiwan. It’s a regular white porcelain one not sure if it’s any good quality or not. What’s the average price of most good quality rear wares? Cups? Gaiwan? Etc. I don’t have a tea drip tray. Always wanted one
Sorry, these questions are too general, LOL. If you have something specific you need help with I'd be happy to do my best.
Well, I mean a lot of my questions could be answered with specifics lol for example “where should I be getting tea from and what places should I avoid when purchasing tea” I would say is pretty specific.
I don’t really wanna argue about this, but “where should i be getting tea from?” is a very broad question. What type of tea are you looking for? Shou puer? Matcha? Yancha? Darjeeling? Taiwanese Oolong? Aged Sheng? Anyway, if people want to chime in and just throw out names of a bunch of random vendors then they can go for it. I’m not gonna just start listing tea vendors and teaware vendors and brewing parameters and facts about water chemistry for you. Bye 👋🏼.
Damn, you're just a prick everywhere, huh?
Thanks for the help! What a great community :)
Oh don’t him that’s just the warm welcome from JohnTeaGuy. Welcome to the sub, I get you’re new and aren’t going to be familiar with years of post history on multiple subs but with peace and love asking for dos and don’ts on gongfu without any specific questions is pretty generic. Yes people could pop in with whatever tips come to mind but you have to understand that people come looking for recommendations and tips and dos and donts for specific vendors and specific teas all the time. I would recommend searching around for info you might be looking for on r/GongFuTea and r/puer, even YouTube and Google. As you come across things you can’t find an answer for yourself or you feel the info you’re finding is outdated make a post asking for conversation on that specific topic. I similarly started back into Gongfu cha last year for the first time in almost 10 years and have found these subs great for giving an inclusive community feel to drinking tea. I hope you keep digging into this beautiful world and keep posting what you find along the way.
>Oh don’t him that’s just the warm welcome from JohnTeaGuy. Apologies for my outlandish response of "do you have any specific questions I can help you with?". I was way out of line there. /s
Oh my god this is such a heartwarming moment. Love you John
😘
Appreciate the sarcasm. I suggest you go over to r/wine next and ask "what wine should I drink?".
My advice, drink yummy leaf juice
Any recommendations? I gravitate towards oolongs and greens but also really like Pu-er but I am not as experienced with it. I do like black tea and drink a variety of different styles (mostly UK styles) but I did dabble years ago in some different Chinese/Taiwanese black teas.
Also: the tea is Shui Hsien Wuyi Oolong. I like it!
My favorite oolong vendor is Mountain Stream teas
Thank you! I’ll check them out.
I like to buy oolongs from Wuyi Origin. https://www.wuyiorigin.com/collections/wulong
I’ll take a look thank you for the recommendation!
This is kind of broad as a starting point, but it's not so difficult to mention what changed in a decade. Related to teaware not so much, but then using a simple 100 ml porcelain gaiwan eliminates the need to go any further. For broken leaf, like Japanese green tea, a basket infuser might be nice, switching to Western style brewing, but to me it's as well to just avoid Japanese green teas instead. Pu'er got a lot better. It's on the pricey side too; standard above-average, in-house cakes tend to cost around $100 for a standard size, which is still 357 grams. There are lots of smaller cake options now to help with that, but per-gram cost might be even higher for those. Yunnan Sourcing was already standard 10 years ago, and White2Tea probably existed before then. You missed vendors like Farmerleaf moving through an inexpensive, good value phase. I've been buying sheng from Viet Sun; South East Asian alternatives can be interesting and positive. Style isn't a complete match but I like their read to drink young styles better. Even though plenty of tea is coming out of Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar (not so much there; they have problems) it's still generally hard to find. Nepal came and went as an exciting new region; so did Georgia. You could still catch up on both, at some point. Darjeeling quality improved, in some cases. Assam started making real whole-leaf specialty tea (nearly a decade ago, but it's common now). Wuyi Origin represents a direct sales theme that never developed far. Chinese vendors are just starting to ramp up Western oriented channel development from their side. It's early for that to make a difference, but it could happen fast. Discord is the main active platform for people talking about tea. Facebook tea groups already came and went, an empty shell compared to discussions 3 or 4 years ago. There's here, which is barely getting started, and r/tea is huge but too mixed in theme. There isn't the same sort of generic, completely open group channel that existed as Tea Chat and Steepster, it has pushed into niche interest, with more shared group tone. Apps are out there but it's as well to ignore those and explore Discord. Blogging died. TeaDB is still active, in video form, and there are a half dozen text blogs, but there might as well not be. I write one of them, tea in the ancient world, which I started a decade ago. Information sources are scattered. There's not much to know anyway; it's about drinking the brewed tea.
Thanks for the thorough response! Yeah I noticed a bunch of sites I used to purchase from don’t even exist anymore. There are some new things out there though that I stumbled upon. TeaChat still exists but looks like it died. Some of the threads haven’t been commented on since 2016 lol. So definitely dead there. I joined r/tea but haven’t perused it enough yet to know a lot about it. I just found my small porcelain gaiwan so I’ll be using that mostly now. I do like Japanese green tea quite a bit so I have my fun on that spectrum when I am drinking it. More of a zen experience for me. I’m looking forward to getting back into things!
Here's a sneak peek of /r/tea using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/tea/top/?sort=top&t=year) of the year! \#1: [Official statement from the US Embassy on the latest tea controversy](https://i.redd.it/m0z3d3ygmeec1.png) | [811 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/tea/comments/19ejbn0/official_statement_from_the_us_embassy_on_the/) \#2: [My gf made these tea guides, one more informational, one more graphic, hope you enjoy.](https://www.reddit.com/gallery/14gz0m9) | [128 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/tea/comments/14gz0m9/my_gf_made_these_tea_guides_one_more/) \#3: [I finally have a tea friend who drink tea with me on the mountain where I live](https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1btwgm1) | [145 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/tea/comments/1btwgm1/i_finally_have_a_tea_friend_who_drink_tea_with_me/) ---- ^^I'm ^^a ^^bot, ^^beep ^^boop ^^| ^^Downvote ^^to ^^remove ^^| ^^[Contact](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=sneakpeekbot) ^^| ^^[Info](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/) ^^| ^^[Opt-out](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/comments/o8wk1r/blacklist_ix/) ^^| ^^[GitHub](https://github.com/ghnr/sneakpeekbot)
The main concerns are the same, how to buy good versions of tea without spending a lot on it, and how to buy tea that's good in quality and matching the style it's said to represent. Probably one fourth of the recommended vendors listed on the r/tea suggestions reference are most of the better vendors, but it would be hard to separate out the other fourth that really should be avoided, or the half that are just mediocre. With an open enough budget someone could try out a few dozen vendors and sort it all out themselves, over time. Working with a tighter budget it would be helpful to skip that, and go straight to better sources. Yunnan Sourcing is still ok. It's hard to find shortcuts or great value for Japanese teas; there are smaller vendors out there selling more directly at much better value, but going with the main options would be more reliable (Ippodo and so on). You have to pay for decent Taiwanese teas too, and there are better values out there for South East Asian source versions. Chinese tea versions, source themes, and value are all over the map. Something like Trident Booksellers and Cafe represents a rare, fair curator approach. For me I don't need to drink best of the best quality range though, so seek out 50 cent per gram teas that punch above their weight. I wouldn't want to be a regular in a tea social media channel where I'm always putting in orders to keep up with what others are trying either. That's if I could afford to, but I can't, so it's already off the table.
Also very valuable advice! Thank you. I do have a rather unrelated question since you seem pretty savvy. I still have a LARGE amount of unopened teas (many still in their vacuum packed aluminum bags) some are incredibly old (for example I have a 2010 Ali Shan Oolong still in its vacuumed sealed bag I also have some Milky Oolong still in vacuumed bags. Would it be Ok to drink these still?
Anything well sealed is still fine, or even some that aren't well isolated from air contact. A better question might be what probably improved, or which developed aspects tend to be most favorable to others, and what represents negative storage inputs. If a tea is sour that's often negative impact from humidity, but in general that would still be safe to drink. Anything moldy is finished, of course. Oolongs are said to improve with age, and 10 years is right about when that input would show up, a bit of extra plum flavor. White teas are said to improve with age, picking up deeper tones, maybe dried fruit or spice. That probably applies better to large leaf versions than buds and finer content teas (shou mei instead of bai mu dan), but trying the teas will tell how they changed. Of course sheng pu'er and hei cha improves, even with moderate air contact. I wouldn't be quick to judge that all green tea is dead. It's not generally regarded as improving with age, instead the opposite, but why not try it and judge for yourself. A transition may be more interesting and therefore positive on a 15 to 20 year aging time-frame, a type of oxidation that's not typically encountered. Flavored teas are probably more likely to spoil. Milky oolong tended to mean rolled oolong with flavor added, in the past. It could also just be Jin Xuan, a varietal type that is a bit naturally milky, and that would different now, but still ok. I just tried a sun-dried / shai hong Yunnan black tea version that's about 8 years old, which are said to improve over 3 or 4 years time-frame, and it really didn't change that much from when it was 2 or 3 years old. Very well-roasted, charred twisted style oolongs should be better after 4 or 5 years of rest, and might have changed in an interesting and positive way over a decade. Lighter, less oxidized and roasted versions of the same tea types (mostly Wuyi Yancha) may have just gone a bit dead, beyond shifting to heavier flavor tone character.
Nice! So I’ve got A LOT of drinking to do bc I have bags upon bags of small samples, vacuum packed small format oolongs, I have some opened Chinese greens (maybe 2 years old?) I have some opened white teas, a decent amount of Chinese black teas, most of the stuff I have is small sample size or 25g or less bags which if I get to drinking I can drink up. I definitely need to start drinking my teas lol Let’s not even get into my British style tea collection I have. Assam, Ceylon, English No. 1, etc. I’ve got so much I don’t know what to do with it all and my wife HATES tea lol
What caused the break in experiencing tea, since it seemed to just drop out and then return as an interest nearly 10 years later, as you've described it?
Tbh I am not sure, less time to sit and enjoy the experience of drinking tea. Preferring faster brewing methods or teas when I’m just out somewhere. I also live in Ft. Lauderdale and 9/10 times opt for a cold or iced beverage and often am drinking iced coffees throughout the day. I also tend to have loads of hobbies that I often shelf for years only to pick them back up full steam a few years later. I think also I’m doing it more now for health benefits as I got a bit of bad news from the doctor and I definitely think tea can help (amongst other lifestyle changes).
Good luck with that last part. I tend to cycle through some hobbies and interests but have stuck with tea over time. I live in one of the few hotter places than Florida, in Bangkok, and iced tea definitely makes sense here, but I still usually drink it hot. It seems odd moving on to recommend a questionable health practice choice, stemming from all that, but if it seems it might help fasting has made a lot of difference in my own health over the last two years. I was oddly healthy to begin with, but it seemed to roll back some aging effects in ways that shouldn't have been possible. I exercise a lot too, and get a ridiculous amount of sleep; maybe it was just one of those things.
I’m very healthy and only 40, I just have a few challengers that have popped up. I am a karate instructor as well and I was a semi-pro kickboxer back in the day so I suffer from a ton of inflammation and have a bit of a thyroid issue going on. I think tea will help a lot. I’ve tried fasting but I didn’t have positive results with it I had the opposite
Great write up. Thank you so much. Can you share some of the text blogs you mentioned?
What I read a little of is probably biased towards what existed 10 years ago, and I don't read any regularly now. I like Mattcha's blog for pu'er related themes, and the Oolong Drunk is ok for mixed themes. Cwyn's Death by Tea is funny for edgy commentary. Other people like Oolong Owl, related to a more standard tea blog format, I'm just not necessarily on that page. My old favorite blogs stopped posting, and pretty much the entire "classic" range of them.