Cwyn's Death By Tea

Plastics Errs and Oops

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 02:42:47 +0000

You have seen this before.

Right, so let us see the tea writer starting off the new year on a wrong foot. I killed a tea. Not much tea, but still, some, and cannot be replaced. Like all the mistakes I regularly make, I try to learn something even if doomed to repeat.

So what happened? We have had winter and -25C temperatures for several weeks now, and I ventured onto my unheated porch to find I left a tea out there since last summer. Nothing important, readers will recognize this last bit of 2012 CNNP Fuzhuan brick tea I bought from Jay in Hong Kong. This is what's left of the 1 kilo brick after taking a year to drink most of it in 2021. I stopped with a small piece left to serve as a reference for other teas in the future. Last summer we had a warm, humid season after two droughty summers when I didn't porch store my tea. So when we finally got a good tea fermenting summer, I set out only my Fu bricks and also Houde's drinker bricks just to acclimatize. I brought in my other teas, but overlooked this bit of brick sitting atop a file cabinet.

Adding a damp square
of paper towelling.

I keep dreaming of Fu Zhuan covered with crusty, zesty yellow flowers. But my tea shows how dry my climate really is outside of a few summer months. The bit of tea was stored in a loose plastic wrap. You can see how the erotium crystatum fungi is just little powdery bits now. After months and months untended on a now dry and freezing cold porch, the tea itself has more problems. I decided to try and revive it by adding a damp bit of toweling paper into a stainless steel container and put the whole thing in a warm place.

The flowers have sprouted back, which shows that the fungi survives in dry spore form and with dehydration and warmth will return. Fu brick is not strong like puerh tea, and once browned with age the broth is soothing rather than harsh. But this tea is just flat with hardly any flavor.

Better?

I have seen bags of dried eurotium crystatum for sale on various websites. If I had a really humid climate, I could feel confident in ordering dried spores, knowing they revive easily. I could add them to my tea steeping, and probably with more flavorful results than trying to "grow" them. Kinda cool to know that.

But now this tea is basically flavorless, so I can toss it or drink it. The life of the tea was 4 years in Hong Kong, and then 10 years with me. The tea initially was green, I think the fully browned tea here reflects a realistic purchase of tea which gets a good start in a humid place before importing it to store.

Browned and brewed.

To store, as in, not on your porch during winter.

Another thought that emerged from the incident was the plastic wrap I had around the tea. More and more articles are emerging with the dangers microplastics may have to our bodies over time. How do I feel about storing in plastic?

Not sure I have a firm thought. First, one must honor our Yunnan (and elsewhere) tea producers who have stored tea wrapped mainly in bamboo and paper materials. These are ideal and most healthy materials for aging in warm, moist climates. But in cold, dry climates, we need other options. My solution has been the type of ceramic farm crocks that my family has used for generations to ferment cabbage.

Plastic is a stabilizing material that can prevent interactions with the environment, and slow or altogether stop aging. Heating plastic is said to release more micro particles than cold plastic. Older vintage plastics apparently are more "shedded" than newer plastics.

The written articles on microplastics are everywhere, but they aren't fully definitive. I myself have recommended wrapping in plastic to preserve tea that needs no further aging. Puerh teas are often sold in shrink wrap over the paper wrapper in part to keep them from absorbing scents in tea shops. Plastic wrap may be a strategy for online selling, to keep the tea looking as close to the photos as possible. Some tea writers prefer to store in plastic.

I am still a little ambivalent on plastic. After all, I'm drinking a tea that might contain far worse chemicals, in some cases. Consensus seems to emerge on most things puerh, the small observations and mistakes still matter for everyone. I like to hear about these observations more than all the debates. I need some alternatives to plastic wrap. Tins are ok, but they are drying, and containers will still need controls with so much air.

Happy New Year! 🐎

Reply to Lew Perin (@babelcarp)

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 03:46:00 +0000

Dear Lew,

Thanks for the email. I know this is Thanksgiving weekend, but not sure what year. The blasts from the past are blaring fast. Somehow I just remembered I have a tea blog. No joke, I been off tea for a little over a week after getting a tooth pulled, my first non-wisdom adult tooth, the kind when they pull it nothing grows back.

"Your dental hygiene is perfect, why do you have a completely decayed tooth?" the hygienist asks.

"Pesticides probably.." I am prepared to launch into discussing my puerh tea hobby to divert from the tubs of truth Dubble Bubble gum I ordered before Halloween.

"It's rotted from inside out," says the dentist with the pliers.

"Yeah, it's definitely the pesticides, or the herbicides even." The dead tooth is covered with tea stains where the floss can't reach, leaving my alternate truth firmly intact. Maybe I will skip the Swiss Colony Butter Toffee this Christmas, if I live that long.

A gaping hole in my face that won't get filled. No super hot tea for a month, dentist says. I don't like cold purrrr...

My blasts from the past are firmly in the news. Childhood memories of Lake Superior, the Ojibwe, Bayfield locals...four years of archival research, a million emails, convent visits and memories. My friend publishes her book, she pulls so many threads into a huge, soaring narrative. And she even put me in it! The book will be a classic.

Medicine River
by Mary Annette Pember

Not long before her book, there was the film. The sisters sponsored a showing, and then said they "provided" the film, alternate truth. The film will tell you about a decaying oil pipeline running through the Lake Superior wild rice beds.

Oh, all the way to the Vatican, for the general of my order got elected to the presidency of the LCWR, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR). Side note: If you have an activist memory and go way back to 1979, Sister Theresa Kane was the president of the LCWR back then and famously told John Paul II to start ordaining women as priests. So, yeah that US nun group. My order got elected twice.

Main note: When the film came out, Sister Sue resigned the presidency, after meeting with both Pope Francis, who then passed away like the next day, and then with Pope Leo too. Less than a month ago, the order decided to do a land grant to the Ojibwe. Historic level, first ever "reparations" in the Catholic Church for the boarding schools. Sort of.

Ojibwe friend phones.

"Wut. Why are they asking for $33,000?"

"It's what they paid for it in 1966. "

"The chief said, 'if it's a gift, why not $1?'"

"Did they say why?"

"Yeah I asked," said my friend. "They just sat there and said nothing."

"Ah, you ran up against their obedience. They can't talk about the internals. The order is divided. Half deny any child abuse, and think it was a good school, and they won't accept the word 'reparations.'"

I saw them horrifyingly divided, on my visit. On that visit, my provincial asked me if I had taken a set of Corelware when I left. 30 years ago. A social blunder on her part, which I called out by mailing a check for $35, because I knew she would send it back, and she did. So, I get the mentality of the $33,000, nuns and thrift, the circumstances we all come from in early life play a role. Getting back the orginal investment must be the thing that passed the measure on votes, because by my view reparations allegedly didn't.

I think it good, however, that the land parcel will not fall into a tourist trade. The sisters no longer need it. The tribe said they buried people on the island.

A step, but I think whatever unsaid historical child abuse I was swallowing ended up rotting in my tooth. Unless the tea pesticides did it.

Life has more jokes for me blasting from the past.

My high school boyfriend is running for US Congress.

Apparently, life is not fully complete for me until I see a US congressional candidate on TV, and think "yeah, I went parking with this guy."

(I'm not linking anything, because I dunno why. Anyone can look it up. It's 7th Wisconsin District. Where all the Ojibwe tribes are, coincidentally. He's a nice guy, go vote. )

Last time I saw him, I was still in the order and he called me a religious fanatic. He just tweeted "Wow, wow" about the Ojibwe land deal, however. Are the Sisters fanatics now? Am I? You know I am.

SO I AM JUST FINE.

How are you?

But I cannot find my 2005 Naka tea. I'm sure I own two or three. Unless I drank them? It's a 357g-er, so it can't just go anywhere.

Gah, they cost $620 now.

This was supposed to be my cancer tea, Lew. And I just drank it up...I guess...did I?

I haven't heard from you in years. Blast from the past so fast, I should probably get my affairs in order? If I drank the Naka, surely it must be time. If not, I will write you again. We had some good tea with Sebastian that day in Manhattan.

Cwyn

Same Smelly Wet Pile, Different Year ( 2016 Treachery of Storytelling 2)

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 02:06:00 +0000

History repeats itself, and to find any progress I have to look darn close. I could subtitle the whole thing Mr. B, the Tree and oh yeah, the Tea. Storytelling is still Treacherous. I am completely re-experiencing a blog post from 2016, and not of my own free will.

To refresh the memory, Mr. B is a crazy friend of other crazy friends, and he's manic again. Oh yes, he's been in the blog before. He is again staying up at a rural car junkyard owned by David, car mechanic. Summer texts...

Then. (2016)

Me: "Have you talked to him, I am just trying to find out if his phone works!"

[Mr. B lost no fewer than 3 cell phones this summer.]

Ron: "B's called me at least 20 times in the last 24 hours! Just a bunch of crazy shit as usual! But no haven't talked to him! I really don't have anything to say at this point!"

---

Me: "Mr. B is doing ok, David checked on him. Lost his phone, I will try and go out Tuesday and maybe we can find it."

Greg: "Good 👍."

And,

Me: "Saw Mr. B. yesterday, jumped his battery, food/gas/beer. He tried to piss on my car. But he’s bathed, knows where phone is, motor home covered in porn so he seems fairly happy. Wants to come to Madison, I said you will visit “sometime soon.” Later in fall, eh? 😅🎄"

Greg: "🐸🦎🐰🦄🦙🐑🦊🧞‍♂️"

---

Me: "Hi, tell B. I dropped off his laundry, in white bucket, food in the bottom."

David: "He saw it, you can call him now we got him another phone. I forgot to give him your number. He was happy to see that and the food too."

Now. (2025)

Everyone is growing weary of his smelly, wet piles. Both Mr. B and my silver maple tree in the backyard are about the same age, and with them, what grows up eventually comes back down. The tree is not having a very good year. The storm that flooded out Milwaukee on August 10 went through my backyard across the state first, lightning ripping out two huge tree limbs. My son cut up one, and a raccoon ran out of it. The other huge, broken branch stayed stuck up in the tree. Time to call in Branches tree service. I photographed them back in 2016 when they cut my tree the last time.

Then. (2016 Instagram post)

Tree Guy: "Say...we were driving in here and suddenly remembered you. You gave us some tea, these hard disc things."

"Yeah, that sounds like me, all right. Did you like the tea?"

Tree Guy: "I don't exactly remember but the discs were cool."

"Oh, I can give you some more."

Tree Guy: "I wasn't asking, I didn't mean to--"

Me: "Oh it's ok, I have a tea blog and get sent lots of tea."

Tree Guy: "Yeah something about a blog."

I gave them a 2 gallon ziploc with Yunnan Sourcing's Drunk on Red, white2tea's A & P Red as well as a bag of 2017 raw white tea leaves which is probably stale, but never opened, ditto with a huge bag of Lapsang. I further foisted off a cigar-whiskey-scented 2016 Xiaguan raw tuo, no idea how I ended up with it.

And a check. I paid them $1600 to take those teas. They left me the huge, smelly wet pile of leaves and mulch. Because I am supposed to like smelly wet piles and photographic evidence is king, pic and it happened. They thoughtfully added in pine needles from another job, because fresh-cut silver maple smells like throw up.

To 100% complete the karmic revisit of the 2016 blog post, I must now try The Treachery of Storytelling 2, eh?

Treachery...

Wasn't this like a $300 beeng? We don't discuss tea prices in my house. Only 200g. Class of tea unknown to market, yada yada. Of course my blog post is idiotic and didn't list the price. Because it doesn't matter. Stupid has no explanation, so why dress it up further with actual details. I remember thinking it is a nice tea. Nice enough that I decided to tin the beeng and not age it. Enough to keep it fragrant and alive. It's in with other non-agers, like the w2t 2015 Yiwu which was a really wet drinker tea anyway, and the 2015 Bosch which Marco G hotboxed, probably a good plan.

But what I really want to be able to do is age-budge a nasty compressed tuo, and not even pushing to visible mold affects them much. So why obliterate a nice floral tea unless it's just undrinkable and I'm not losing anything. Anyway. The Storytelling has browned some, just some oxidation on the surface. Smells nice and very green. Basically the tinning keeps it green. I popped off 5 grams.

Still has the floral opening but a touch incense which is probably the Bosch affecting it. I drank just before dinner in an empty stomach, because why not, and paid in body heat and sugar crash. My son's father Mr. Passport Bro is back from Hangzhou, he drank steep #2 and passed out, which he denied after waking up. I drank Steep 3 at 176 F (75 C), and it was insanely bitter. I don't remember this bitterness, but steep #4 with boiling kettle was better, moving from the fruity floral to more vegetal tomato vine.

Steep #4

Now I get the mid-steeps which is where this tea shines. I did #5 two days later and the leaves resumed beautifully with a powdered violet note, the way old cosmetics smell, like old Chanel blushes or your mom's Guerlain Meteorites.

But it's really, really green. Yeah I sorta screwed up. Brewing around the bitterness, I think how I should have put this in aging conditions. Only 200g, less now at least 10g, it was nice enough fresh so I didn't. It's not too late, but meh. I need to try and drink it. Body-wise, it's got the stomach heat and throat vapor, the brew is yiwu thick, it's like a Mansa. All the notes I like, floral veggies is what lingers. I can only reasonably do one brew a day, it really gives me jitters. Less is more when sick and old.

Otherwise, I'm drinking up older stuff, and running out of old tea. Bought Houde's cheap $100/kilo 2005 Dayi brick tea and I've been drinking that all summer. Seems to work to regular-diet the cheap tea and do the pricey dessert on a weekend. At 5 steeps, the lower grade large leaf Dayi is cashed. Ten steeps in, Storytelling still just getting started. Big difference. Both teas worth what the vendors charged.

Took me so many days to write this, that Son has completely dispatched the smelly wet pile of tree trimmings. My posts are slower now, but don't worry, it's just a different year.

How Dry I Am

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 09:31:00 +0000

Here is a truth to let sink in. Your entire puerh tea collection is 10 days to 3 weeks away from being entirely fermented and done.

This is all the time it takes to break down the cell walls of our tea leaves, release the juices and convert the sugars with bacteria and fungi. This is what we call composting, by adding heat and humidity in sufficient proportion to begin to rot the tea just enough to break down the cellulose.

Quick fermentation. The question is, why aren't you breaking up your collection and doing it?

The question I am asking is of those folks who claim to be unhappy with their tea because their outdoors climate is too dry and to blame for their undrinkable tea. Because what they want is dark, inky, and basement tasting. I can understand people liking this profile as a daily drinker. What I don't get is why people will pay a lot of money to order warehoused tea from overseas, instead of composting their bitter tuos and resting a couple years into something drinkable for them.

With the costs of tariffs and shipping overseas now, seems even more silly to contemplate ordering warehoused tea when you can get cheap beengcha from someplace like Yunnan Sourcing, break them up into a crock, and wet warehouse them yourself.

Well, then it's shou. Firstly, there is no microbial difference between shou and a sheng of the same exact tea aged to the same point as the shou. We "assume" the sheng has more "nuances" but that may really depend on the leaves more than how they were fermented. They may in fact taste the same either way, especially if the base material isn't complicated to begin with. And that is indeed the case with factory tea, especially the bitter tuos nobody wants to drink unaged. They don't magically gain complexity they lacked young, no, we need more in the base material to begin with.

The lover of quick warehoused tea is already giving up nuance just by warehousing, in favor of a mustiness covering it all. At this point, the "integrity" of the base material hardly matters because it was originally bitter, smoky or just one note, and priced under 10 cents a gram when new, for all those reasons. It is cheap plantation and you like it, except not when new.

Nothing wrong with any of that, but why are you complaining about your storage while spending big bucks to import it already-warehoused? Why are you blaming the air outside your house when you can't bring yourself to get the fermentation done? Your "undrinkable" tea needs to be removed from the wrappers, broken up and fermented so you can have a drinkable (according to your taste) beverage instead of money spent on tea you are merely storing.

The main reason to "store" rather than ferment is because storage preserves what you already like about that tea from new. Makes perfect sense to keep those delicate fragrant notes rather than pounding them into oblivion with heat and humidity.

But if your collection consists of teas that you don't like when they are new, teas that are too bitter or whatnot, why not just go ahead and ferment them? The only reason to keep these teas intact is because you plan to sell and they are worth more unwrapped. However, if your tea is primarily for you to drink, with no plan to sell, then no reason at all to keep the tea intact. Get your money's worth by drinking them.

I am just gonna say it. You must be in love with the wrapper. You are in love with the shape. You don't mind all the space in your house taken up by teas you can't or won't drink. You harbor nonsensical hopes that the tea will magically be wonderful someday, only to find your storage has done nothing to move them toward merely drinkable for you. For the warehoused tea lover, any raw tuo is a waste just sitting around in a dry wrapper. It will never be what you want to drink, unless you do to it what God intended for the large leaf varietal.

Let's go further. I don't think any tea you are dry storing will be what you want, especially if you are ordering your actual drinkables from overseas.

The upside is you can stop with the tea storage. You can stop complaining about your dry tea climate and apply the proper method to get your tea fermented and done. You now know the only reason it doesn't work for you is because YOU won't unwrap that tea, lose the wrapper, break up that compressed shape, and mist it down. You have to break up the tea because heat and water can't penetrate the iron compression. If this is too much for you, why not just sell it and continue ordering already-done tea from Hong Kong as you need to?

Puerh fermentation takes mere days to complete. The tea needs to rest for about two years. Longer if you pull the tea early, and only want a half fermented. I have completely fermented tea twice. I personally like shou after 10 years, but it's quite drinkable after two years. Shou is so much easier to store, because I am STORING to preserve it. I can use less humidity and lower heat than when fermenting. My storage set-up then makes sense as more of a tea pantry.

Think about it. All the tea you own is days from done, not years. If that is what you want.

A New Old Shou

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Wed, 14 May 2025 19:13:00 +0000

Bonston BP-12 Automatic Brewer

Tailspin over the tariff rollercoaster to decide whether I really need anything. The true answer is always a hard no, but I normally get past my inner no without issue. Then I logged into Yunnan Sourcing US and my account says my last purchase was February 2020...

That can't be right. I know I bought that unnecessary Mojun Fucha brick, it was shipped from Texas because Scott imported a bunch of them. But I might have bought it on the dot com site, and it got shipped from Texas anyway. Have I really purchased NOTHING from Yunnan Sourcing US for 5 whole years?

No, no, no. I feel like I just woke up by looking at my account. The answer is my Son is drugging me. He put a mickey in something for the past 5 years, probably because he saw most of his inheritance turned into tea and thought, yeah enough of that. So I may be surfacing or the tariffs are screaming through all the drugs.

Sometimes a person needs stuff. I have to throw out the plastic Kamjove gravity steeper. Why I needed and used a plastic teapot when I have the best ceramics in the world, I will never know. Plus it had a black plastic top, black plastic which is recycled PC wires containing forever chemicals that turn progeny into two-prongfoot abominations, and then I proceeded to drink boiling water from the thing??? It HAS to go.

(to be fair, this is just my age-related dementia because the Kamjove says it has food-grade PC material.)

Luckily, Scott thought ahead to when I finally reach peak paranoia conclusions by stocking an all-glass gravity steeper. This is the Bonston BP-12 Automatic Brewer. What a beautiful piece it is, the lines evoke something-something-EU mid-century moderne, with the wood handle and lid. At $54 of course this is more costly than the plastic Kamjove TP-160 ($19.25 US), but you will easily save that discrepancy down the line by passing along less in the family tree.

My session photo is brewing hong.

The wood lid contains a magnet, so the lid snaps onto the pot, the mate is the metal rod. After filling with water, just snapping the lid on will drain the liquid down. But then you turn the lid a little and lift the top off, this locks the steeper again for the next brew. The drainage is instantaneous.

2009 Plum Blossom Shou cake

I added this little shou cake to my YS order, 2009 Plum Blossom Mini 100g because it's too cute, shaped like a mooncake. On the flip side of it is embossed the tea character. At $18.75 for 100g, this is a bit expensive for shou, somewhat justified by the purported age. I told myself that I can drink it up in 3 sessions in the Bonston because of the 200 ml brewing chamber and 800 ml total capacity.

The tea opens with dusty shelf/closet note, confirming dry storage, because the tea has to sit some years to get this opening. It's the reason to drink shou old, you don't get slammed by funk, instead just an old tea cupboard and a bit of fruit. But sadly the tea is just pedestrian after the opening, some nice juiciness in steeps 4 and 5. Color-wise, the tea was just getting started at steep 8, but I could not coax out any more flavor. The fact that I broke up the tea completely, with no chunks to open more slowly and stretch out the session is one user factor, still it just tasted like water. Probably the best way to drink this is brew the entire thing in one go and drink it over a week so it opens real slow. It's not worth it, really.

Beautiful aged brown.

What this tea can be is a super cute mooncake gift you can give to a newbie puerh person. A gift of older puerh tea for $18.75? Yes and yes, and the tea is so basic shou, inoffensive to almost anyone new to puerh. Nothing off, not much funk, and yet nothing to explore for a seasoned drinker. A gift-er.

The magnetic lid snaps onto the metal rod
to drain the tea.

The Bonston brewer is a winner, and I tossed my Kamjove into the landfill to leech into the groundwater in the county next door for generations to come. Mea culpa.

Correspondence, Chen Sheng Hao

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Fri, 09 May 2025 08:50:00 +0000

8th May 2025

9 May 2025

We Are Screwed

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 23:00:00 +0000

Where is all the panic? Massive tariffs loom before us in buying tea direct from China. You'd think puerh heads in the US might take out a 3rd mortgage to buy up whatever last of the Lao Ban Zhang or the 2020 anything they can get their hands on, in shipping multiples of $800 orders or less to avoid the previous set of tariffs upon which the new 125% will apply. One expects the Yeeon aficionados to order extra boxes of basement dirt from Hong Kong to flavor their own stashes extra dank, all before slow-boat shipping is officially halted and before the private courier just isn't worth the expense, never mind the bother. Even though the latest memes give every indication of the dire need for the slimming effects of shou in the west.

I don't hear any complaining. Not seriously.

Well, students always complain their tight budgets prohibit full indulgence of their puerh habit, but more on that in a minute while Old Cwyn sorts out this mess.

On the top end of tea, no one really cares. In fact, at the top end, tea buyers can think of the savings on tariffs as a beautiful justification to fly to Guangzhou and buy in person, or a lesser excuse like my ex getting a nice hotel in Huizhou while stalking an old girlfriend. Once in China, just courier everything back. Dirty tea tourism.

The top tier buyer probably doesn't sweat an extra $200 or $2000 tea premium and they got courier all along and first name basis with their tea pimps. If they don't like the tea, it's expensive compost. Although I am certain whole offices are dedicated to crunching numbers to see how much the buyer can tolerate on price increases or whether the blends will be sprinkled with a bit more Myanmar leaf than before which is probably cheaper although one hopes not. Or whether the warehouse in Canada is now a bad idea with double tariffs to consider. In any case, the actual buyer at the end of this chain worries about precisely none of this because they have multiple tea sources and multiple couriers ready to deliver. It's a business matter on the factory end to figure out how to sell to rich buyers.

Same deal for the mid tier junk tea buyers on Taobao. By now the lesser endowed but still fluid guys have at least 3 agents who no doubt quickly pivot to cover any customer situation with private courier, and to mark Gift and Happy Birthday Uncle all over the box. Is it really a problem?

I feel pretty sure Uncle John Kingteamall and Uncle Scott at Yunnan Sourcing will sort things out in western retail for our middle wallet tea basketeers. These guys are one fewer middleman cheaper than your other favorite curators.

Buuttt, then again, don't most middle tea basketeers already have all the tea they really want? I don't see the panic here, instead I see these people trying to sell. Some perhaps overbought in the early throes of puerh enthusiasm. Others are holding tongs that well, they no longer like so much. Their palates changed, maybe. Did they get bored of the hobby? Annoyed with the storage issues...I have heard that often enough. Or do they view the incoming tariffs as a boon to make a "huge" profit selling tea at a good margin, but still far less than new + tariff? That is not completely outlandish. Remember when a certain online company (let's nickname as "Foggy Mountaintop") offered to buy back their tea when the price at the tea farm went up? Can't complain about a real opportunity for resale and trade. We still have threads on Steepster!

Now we arrive at the budget buyer whose dusty little tuos just got more pricey, and aspirational tea even further out of reach. We are a little bit screwed, at least in retail, and words like fu brick are not comforting. But in the after market, with middle buyers starting to sell off tea, we might find tea otherwise long sold-out. Or sample bags destined for the bin given a new life in tea trading. Eh, budget buyers might be surprised that the best market is more local, with stateside vendors selling stock on hand. At the very least, we can comfort ourselves that coffee drinkers have it far worse. At least tea is not scarce.

If wallets really do pinch out, what will happen to all that tea, especially if folks in Asia tighten their wallets too? I sorta see companies storing for 4 years, if they have to, to stave off any major price drops. Make premium product even more at a premium just to find. What was it Herodotus said, the money never stays in one place for very long. The taps will again flow.

But now is a time of dribbles and drips. If a US Dad is sitting on a nice tea collection, this 4/20 day he may enjoy what he has, justified and ancient with fat knowledge of riches acquired long ago, in the "before times." Knowing that at least 50% of his neighbors don't give a shit. One less thing to worry about.

Shelf Stash Update #2

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Sun, 05 May 2024 02:35:00 +0000

Example of shelf stashing.

This year my stash goal is to deal with the little bits and bobs of tea I have stored on my tea shelves, in every sort of container imaginable, including inside teapots and other teaware. These are mainly remainders of samples, the last bits of a beeng, or abused tea experiments. My stash behavior is a form of squirreling that I need to get in check. I am tired of the crowded shelves and the dusting work. Some experiments were left to sit and need checking on, like teas I deliberately composted and brought back from Mold City.

I need to get a handle on the behavior and reduce the number of tea samples not in bags, but in containers, little micro-biomes. What will in fact happen is that I will likely shuffle things, drink up a few, and probably stash a few more. The big mental hang-up with most of these squirreled teas is that I saved them for a reason. This thought prevents me from just dumping all of them out. That sample could be a thousands of $$$ tea I can never afford in a million years. Or it could be something humid and I was testing the container material for storage, the 3 or 4 Inge Nielsen sample clay jars are one such experiment.

To add further complexity to the matter, I didn't always label the stashes. I would say maybe 50% of the time I put a slip of paper in with the tea, or I cut out a label or logo from a wrapper or baggie. But I have many that I didn't label, instead I thought "oh I will remember what that is," with the notion of checking on it in 6 months or a year and I never did, and now it's years too late to even know what it is. If I IG'd the tea or blogged it, well then I can try and find it. These are the teas I will be sure to mention.

I felt so enthused in January starting off tackling the top shelf. I put maybe 4 teas on the radiators with some moisture to wake them up. And then I got the CSH box in the mail, and my nerve injury, and gut issues from the nsaids which stopped my project and most tea drinking for 6 weeks. Now I am varied by the day with either one or two doses of nsaids, but this is not nearly as bad as every 4-6 hours. I have been able to finish a bunch of samples/projects.

Okay, so the first sample of note is the left jar in the above photo. The jars are where, in 2018, I put two samples sent to me by blogger Wilson from his own collection. I tried one of the samples and put something on IG maybe, but did not try the other, so this is the one I targeted first. It is a Green Mark 7542 recipe, but I don't know what year, and not sure he told me. Maybe early oughts, but I am not a jerk to ask someone their tea secrets. I think he trolled me by saying I should try an aged 7542, but really turns out to be "taste the storage." :P

Wilson's Green Mark ??

The storage on this tea is perfection. First steepings have a slight humid note that is mostly mineral but not too much, a small TCM whiff, but not too much, these will go to a powdery note the longer they sit. So, this tea had some brief heat and humidity years and years ago (leather texture), and then natural dry storage after that. This tea is completely changed, it just needs long storage to get that ancient-shelf little bit floral dustiness. So I covered it with paper toweling for air circulation and to prevent mold, it could also be wrapped in plastic to preserve it now. It's really done, and in the best possible way.

First steep

So at the start, first steep the mustiness whiff and TCM, the next few steepings note of root beer, wood, a little bit plummy. The taidi tea leaves are chopped, but more sturdy than we see now in similar factory teas. Really a very mild tea that anyone can drink.

Steep 5

When cooled, the mineral note is little tending toward bitter but never gets there, the stage is passed. I couldn't push it past 8 steeps, it really fell off. With the leathery texture, sometimes you can rest it a day or two, or do a boil and get more out of it, but I did not do so. I congratulate Wilson yet again on his storage.

Steep 8

Next, I found a 2016 Hekai from Chawangshop, in a cloth bag from same. I have written about this tea a lot for its diuretic effect. I switched prescription diuretics in maybe 2019, so I stopped drinking this so often. I owned a tong plus one, and have 2 1/2 cakes left. This is a half I kept in the bag, uh...in a linen closet shelf. Soooo.....

2016 Chawangshop Hekai

My photos are bad, but it was winter when I took them.

The tea is quite brown compared to fresh spanking green in 2016. I didn't photograph the session because orange-y yellow is orange-y yellow and I have written about this tea plenty. The big change is Steeps 1-5 are now rather sweet and honey/floral. Where is the daisy/tomato vine I used to love, the kidney clean-erator? It is still there, at steep 5 the sweetness is off the top and I get the green savory notes back that I like. Note to self to get cracking on the Hekai habit again, the aging is well and good, but in this one case I'd rather drink this green. The vendor should feel pleased at the changes on the tea. The remaining two whole beengs from the tong are in a tin, which is good for what I want, in not aging it much more.

Then I found a tin of loose shou puerh from an American vendor called Leaf and Spoon. I tracked an old url for them and they are now mainly a coffee company with a new name and logo. They were a company that some of us on Steepster tried to support with an order. As I recall, I bought green teas from them that I drank up, and this tin was either free or I tacked it on my cart to get free shipping, or something just extra. It was just under half full.

Tiny gong ting leaves brew crazy amount.

Well, this turns out to be a gong ting shou, the tiny spring tips of puerh tea. Just amazing to think this was considered just a basic tea then. Today a good gong ting will cost you, and the vendor knows this is what they have and charge accordingly.

I did 15 steepings of this tea, and the tin had 3 sessions left in it, so drinking this up took nsaid February. And 15 steepings wasn't enough, the tea still was going and easily could be boiled after 20 steeps. Unreal to think a meh ordinary vendor shou more than 10 years ago is this good. Juicy cherry with a little dusty fermentation flavor.

One more session of note that I did not photograph was the remains of a sample of white2tea's 2015 72 Hours. This was a sample I squirreled in a gaiwan and drank to test the aging of the one intact beeng I have left. Like the Hekai, I have written about this tea quite a bit, and will do so again when I crack into the last beeng. The tea blend is supposed to mature in 6 years, and we are well past that. I don't remember what I thought of it other than the same as last time, there is something of a white2tea house flavor, some leaves that get in other teas as well.

As of now I have four more orphan squirreled teas sitting ready to try. I am in for a long project.

Stop It

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 03:53:00 +0000

Nothing is worse than a well-endowed whinge. We are even more repulsed when such a whinge is a boring repeat of a topic covered ad nauseum on blogs and forums. The following has been said 10 million times already, but I'm now fed up and I am just saying it.

For the most part, I have stayed away from discussing puerh factory blends and processing along the lines of so-called "modern" puerh teas. Why is that? Well, I get it. Everything the factories sell must appeal to someone, because otherwise why would they sell these teas? Nobody persists in selling what does not sell, so clearly I don't fully know the market that buys "modern processing." I do not want to berate anyone's personal taste in tea, so if you are happily buying new factory productions every year AND drinking them up, I will still love you. I suggest you go tuck in with a cuppa and click right out of here.

Now, I understand a very salient fact of puerh tea, and that is the vast majority of puerh teas do not last to the 20 year mark. This is probably one of the major observations on the part of factories. You just cannot easily buy 20 year+ puerh tea simply because there is little of it, and what remains and manages to get to market somehow is horrifically expensive. So, the factories need not look very far to conclude that puerh is a short-term product that is either consumed or destroyed before 20 years, except for obsessive puerh hoarders.

Thus, the factories have chosen to market to this reality, that people are likely to consume their tea in the short term rather than the long term. Puerh of course is a difficult drink when new, harsh on the body, yada yada, so anything they can do to appeal with that first sip, well...they are doing it. They know young puerh is a turnoff for new customers, and growth depends upon the new customer. This means you may be getting a production meant to be consumed now, or consumed earlier, rather than stored and aged.

Factories do all kinds of things to favor the front end experience of the tea, starting with propogation and ending with the wok and pressing. To figure out exactly how a particular tea gets tweaked, you need to drink it multiple times and even then, the full result is a company secret. We can pick out obvious things like oxidation, improper sha qing like browned edges, sun-drying, "wild" leaves, etc. but we won't know what propogation happened, or exactly how long the tea leaves wilted in the basket after picking.

I don't know who buys and enjoys factory modern blends, but I do know where the market is here. They miscalculated the west. We were to be the "new" customer turned on by tweaked tea blends that don't age, don't need to be stored and aged, but we are not. We were to be the new market for shou puerh, and by and large, we are not. At least, not shou in a tea bag.

The market here is exactly like that of Asia, in that puerh obsessives control the aftermarket, and these are overwhelmingly people who prefer aged, raw puerh. Tell me someone you know who doesn't prefer aged raw puerh over green, and over shou too. Pretty much nobody drinks green puerh, other than to test it. Everyone wants aged raw puerh if they prefer puerh tea at all. What we see here in the west is people would rather have a poorer quality drinker tea leaf, just as long as it is aged, even aged badly, over a fine young tea. Everyone wants it aged and preferably cheap, yes, the full oxymoronic puerh market is the same everywhere. You can't really buy what you want.

Thus, the anticipated "new" customer is not controlling the factory tea market here. No, it is the puerh obsessives who are doing it. They want to buy either an already-aged raw puerh, because they only drink aged, or they will buy new for home storage with the intention of aging it themselves. The drinking crowd wants to drink aged puerh on a daily basis, and thus they don't mind buying inexpensive hot-storage teas from Asia, even if a bit musty and not the best leaf.

But the home storage enthusiast is the ONLY customer who is going to buy new and not drink it. We are looking for qualities that are suited for long aging. We are looking for leaf strength, and intensity and body feel, or mouth feel. We are looking for bitter more than floral. Florals are lovely, but they won't survive storage for long. We want the tea meant to survive the rains, the cold, the heat and are easy to store, thus pressed rather than loose.

Specifically, home storage customers want the recipe teas. The teas processed and proven to age. I am especially referring to the 7542 recipe. This tea recipe is the basic, and the starting basis of almost anyone's collection. Now, this is not to say we don't have much finer teas in our collections, but everyone has basic recipe teas in their storage somewhere. That means teas dated before 2010 or so.

You factories have messed with the recipes to your peril. I need to see actual figures to really believe any western customers buy the newer tweaked teas, beyond one or two examples. I drank up my 09s early, and that wasn't difficult. But it should be impossible to stand to drink those until aged. We want our taidi-cha, thank you very much, and we want it to transform!

Just stop it. Stop whatever it is you factories are calling the recipe teas these days. I don't want any more special productions that don't age. Stop the tweaking.

Now, I know I can buy some taidi tuos and call it a day. The factories do serve the customer drinking puerh for dietary reasons, so we can get teas designed to age, if we are willing to buy tuos and tolerate large leaf bricks and productions with lots of twigs, because these teas are boiled by the consumer to extract the twigs. Cheap means you get large leaf, chopped leaf and twigs. So yes, we can still buy these. But this is the lowest grade, and not the recipe teas.

We cannot expect all the tweaked productions to go away, because someone is buying them. But we can and must advocate for the recipe teas, even if just the 7542, to retain its aging properties. Sadly, we have already advocated non-stop over this for the past 20 years and every year is worse with more tweaking. I will take a tea stuffed in bamboo and roasted rather than a 7542 now. And that should never happen.

I know the leaf itself has changed, the mixes no longer include buying random arbor tea from farmers and throwing it in. Trees and bushes are over-picked. These realities cannot dial themselves back. We will never really buy arbor tea cheap or even white label again, that boat is long sailed and the best tea is hoarded off the top instead of the bottom, it is contracted for a lifetime or more into the future. But the recipe still stands.

This is all said every single day on tea forums in English, and probably in every language elsewhere as well. By the stereotypical puerh obsessives you pros cannot stand. We are saying stop it, and the wallet follows.

2022 CSH Emperor 霸王青饼

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 06:59:00 +0000

My thanks to Chen Sheng Hao for sending over their latest sampler pack, the 2022 Yi Pen box.

2022 Yi Pen Chen Sheng sampler

Also, my apologies for the long delay in getting something posted about this box. I have been out of commission with sheng drinking again due to health issues.

The Yi Pen Cheng Sheng sampler box is a fairly good deal considering you get 7 x 28g mini beengcha, ready to break into four sessions. For $75, this is 196g of tea, not bad at all considering the price of a full size of each of these teas, some of which are not available on the site anyway. CSH samplers are beautifully packaged sessions, and samples really are a must if you are thinking of investing in any of their teas. If this sampler doesn't interest you, the company seems to add 2-3 samplers a year so keep your bookmark ready to check back sometime after spring harvest.

Looking through the description of the teas, the only one offering any bitter profile is the Emperor, therefore the only sample that interests me. This is a recipe the company has been doing since 2008 or so, looking to perfect the idea of an aroma-forward tea. What this means, in terms of the tea, is a company secret; all we know is that blending is disclosed as part of this annual production.

My session with this tea started in February when I tried to sneak in a 7g session in between high doses of NSAIDs. I managed to finish only two steepings, and was awake with a stomach ache the rest of the night. Green puerh does not mix with ibuprofen, even in between doses. I know that, but it's annoying to be off my tea so I did it anyway and paid for it.

My little beeng is very green, if I didn't have the stomach issue I would have brewed the whole thing in one go, a 9-day binge novena is more my speed. Especially since I don't want to keep these broken pieces in a gaiwan on the shelf; I am trying to get away from this behavior. Also, breaking apart the 7g quarters just cracks the leaves into bits. But, in we go, 7g into my 120 ml gaiwan. I do more like 60 ml steeps. The brew has a beautiful pink undertone in the first steeping, my photo looks a little too orange, but the brew is a little deep, the leaves might have some brown edges.

The aroma of the brew is almost dizzying, very floral Mengsong/Hekai-ish, with the more acrid and savory tomato vine, that I prefer, muted and underneath. Bitterness does not disappoint, the huigan is so quick, usually such an asset in a tea. I only took two steepings, that is not enough for me to even feel the caffiene nor any unusual qi. The cup floral aroma lingers.

After this, I let the tea dry out in the gaiwan for two weeks. The tea oxidized black along the top. Normally I am fine with that in my own tea, but I considered starting over with a new session because the tea is different now, I honged it a little. To be totally fair to the tea, I should have started again, but my dodgy stomach decided just two more steeps would be better to get this blog post out sooner by steeping further instead. Both of these steepings still strongly floral with a bit more of the daisy stem than before. I am glad this is bitter, because the floral is just so Disney for me. Almost garish, and cartoon, like those neon colors you know are probably not from nature.

So I accept that blending is a factor, but aroma-forward tea like this has to also be a result of 17 years they have been working on this tea. Is it all nature only? Or have some of these leaves been propagated for aroma? The processing is also a factor, this could be one of those ever-green teas that are meant to be consumed like it is now rather than aged.

I dried out the leaves again, and had two more sessions, so 5 and 6. This time the heavy floral is worked off, leaving the weedy/vine savory notes that I much prefer. Still plenty bitter, the quick huigan is impressive.

But I am overwhelmed by Disney-ish over-the-top everything, the green, the heavy floral, bitter yes but quick get that converted, the huigan like a skater showing off a triple quad. Who is this tea for? Emperor implies a type of tribute, or showcase tea, and this tea shows off the factory more than anything, I can see a table of 8-10 people who can together easily share cups of the first two steepings to appreciate the skill of the factory. Executive tea. This would be great for a teahouse experience.

I wasn't able to finish all of this session. My stomach didn't hurt exactly, because I'm now down to 12 hr spaced doses of nsaids, but it didn't feel great. This tea isn't for me, a home storage enthusiast. The leaves are translucent like tissue, very young trees. I have more to say on that subject, but I will leave it for another post, on another day. The tea had maybe two more sessions left in which I would expect the bitterness to remain, but the floral is mostly gone along with the aroma in the cup. I just can't finish this out.

Again, my apologies for taking so long to review the box, and I appreciate the opportunity, Next year I need to make a better effort to steer away from accepting more samples, my health is too unreliable now. When I can drink tea, I would rather drink what I have now. I prefer the Jin Xiang series over the Emperor, sure the Jin Xiang is a little twiggy but the stems are thick, the leaves are more substantial and processed for home storage. I am certain this tea will not keep the aroma in very warm/humid storage conditions, which limits it for many collectors who store tea.

Letter to a Provincial

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 22:20:00 +0000

November 3, 2023

Dear [Provincial]

What a wonderful lunch we had on Sunday, I appreciate very much the time I spent with you and the others at the table. I hope such an event will not be the last; indeed, I have this thought each time I visit even if the next thought to myself is that I cannot count on it.

Small point of business: I find myself still thinking of the question you asked about the dishes. Since you have something in writing, be it your own notes or a letter of mine, or from [my former nun cousin], I am compelled to clear this up. I do not know what D. may have borrowed, but [our family] can take care of this. As I said, I am fairly certain I bought a simple 4-piece Corelle-ware set from KMart. I see that a similar 4-piece set of Corelle-ware in Winter White sells for $37.92 at Home Depot. With 5.5% sales tax the total retail will be $40. I enclose a check herewith.

Yesterday I had a lovely 82 minute phone conversation with [motherhouse archivist]. She indicated to me that [your sibling] spoke with her. Please thank your sister for me…and tell her that if she feels inclined to finish her busy career in adjudication, I will be happy to come on down and we can start a jazz band...

Ah, I did not have a chance to visit with Sister S., nor even ask the state of her health. I never viewed her woodwork as a “hobby,” but rather an extension of her efforts to restore to rural Wisconsin parishes the loss of their liturgical heritage when Vatican II took so much away and did not replace that with enough better. She worked hard starting with St. Joseph’s [my home parish], but her efforts required 500 more of herself and we just didn’t have the people to help. She knew this. Wood was her way to literally and figuratively “rebuild the church” for disappointed white rural Catholics, and reach as many as she could. That is your Franciscan, right there.

Sister S's efforts lingered in my mind when your sister and I discussed the reliquary at St. Rose, while examining the archives. [Your sister] expressed the fear that what I would call “disappointed white Catholics” might wish to scoop up the relics. I am glad she sees what I see. Indeed, a few of these disappointed Catholics might wish for the demise of the [the order], at least going by what I see online. (Some call themselves Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus, and one doesn’t need to look too deeply to see where they are. For example, check out the adult parish education video series used by the Ashland Parish Cluster in the past year, including at [the tribal parish]. Check who publishes that video series, then check the parent company which will take you to evangelical Protestant political donors.) But why not give bits of the reliquary to these people who might treasure it? We missed an opportunity when Sister S. could have embedded them into artwork, rebuild the Church.

(I read somewhere that two monasteries in Europe each claim to have Jesus’ foreskin. Well now, that is a problem of another magnitude!)

I am unable to find anyone with any working familiarity with the WPA Project [FDR 1936-1940] contents. In it, I found evidence of pressure (gas lighting) on traditional beliefs in Sister M.'s edits (for example, changing phrases like “Indian Beliefs” to “Superstitions”) and this is after 1909 when such pressure to give up traditional beliefs was deemed no longer the policy of the Indian Bureau, and a directive against such pressure was issued. I saw evidence of shielding on the part of the tribal staff, such as in Chief Scott’s essay on drumming as a way to defend against whites.

I feel an urgency of history here in favor of the future, and I will be around awhile. The Ojibwe are re-establishing their seat at La Pointe on Madeline Island, something I never thought I would see in my lifetime! My family [lived] in the Chaquamegon Bay area in the 1970s, and my father built the marina in Washburn with a couple of investors, as well as blocks of condominiums. [My family] saw the poverty of most locals, it was like stepping back 10 years in time from the rest of society. [My family] saw the impact of tourists, and felt a sad resignation thinking the area’s ecology will be lost to overbuilding and tourism pollution some day if the locals do not have the strength to fight it.

But now I am encouraged, rather than discouraged. People need to work together to responsibly administer the Lake Superior Watershed, a unique ecosystem. We cannot stress enough how important the Lake Superior Watershed is not only to the people there, but to the entire system of water in the state of Wisconsin. I am aware that if not for the Ojibwe wild rice beds, we may have lost the Bay watershed. I read somewhere that Lake Superior requires 500 years to entirely replace the water it holds. Every drop will be there for a very long time.

Oh Sister, you were the best ombudsman I have ever known, and I have known many at the state level. I do not have a problem saying that we had Sisters at Odanah who may have had a personality problem, a mental health problem, and/or a drinking problem, we can’t determine which, and wielded the stick of corporal punishment beyond the norm of the time, rising to the level of child abuse. I see no future value whatsoever in defending personal visions of heroic education and conversion of savages in the name of so-called Franciscan ideals that we know today were wrong, just so I can die a personally contented (former) nun. The Watershed is far more important.

Rather, I will say accept the full story of the school, as well as acknowledging the disappointed white Catholics amongst whom Sister M. had a culture of fundraising which amplified tensions between the peoples, a tension that lingers today. I remember all too well the first day I arrived in St. Joseph’s in [P]: that first day, locals told me the [P.] town sign (population 100 or whatever it was) sat exactly on the Menominee Reservation line, and that locals and Indians still had occasional shoot-outs on that line. This was in the late 1980s! The people in [P.] were of French descent, and had been there many generations.

My point is, we need to preserve the Watershed. I fear if I can no longer find the lady slipper flower where I used to find it, then we might feel that old feeling of doom for the area once more. Wisconsin needs a strong Ojibwe and strong locals.

I promise you that I will not burden frail sisters at [the motherhouse] with my views any further. I had my meeting of due diligence and am grateful to you and [your sibling], as well as Sister T. [my classmate], and for your forbearance. I will never stop missing you all deeply.

[Cwyn]

November 17 - 2023

Dear [Cwyn],

I received your letter in early November, as well as a check for $40.

I don't recall that I questioned you about dishes or that I received any letter from you or from [your cousin] about dishes. Therefore, I am returning the the check. You or [your cousin] do not owe us anything. Consider the issue closed.

As we approach Thanksgiving, I hope that you and all of us can discover the goodness of our lives and be grateful.

Blessings,

S. [former Provincial]

Late 80s Tian Jian, 2022 W2T Laochatou and 2024 Stash Goal

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 10:42:00 +0000

Welcome to 2024, and the Year of the Dragon! I hope for an auspicious year for you of tea enjoyment, tea shopping, if you are doing any, and cooperative storage. The new year naturally turns our thoughts to our puerh tea blessings, and I for one have much to thank the tea gods, tea factories, tea vendors and the people of Yunnan for their hard work. Know that your tea is enjoyed around around the world, and where it is not, then all the more for me, and I appreciate you. May everyone on holiday find the comforts of home wherever you are.

I am now in the habit of taking a bit of stock of my teas, come the New Year. More specifically this year, teas I have written about on this blog, whether or not I still own any and how they are doing in storage. Most years I have tea samples to organize, but this year I really need to deal with the under-200g storage situation. I have too many small quantities of tea stored in various jars, tins, small crockery, even samples stashed in tea pots. Now mind you, some of these are exceptional teas that I never had a large amount of, but they are a lucky tasting situation, or something special from a vendor. Maybe bits of tea club boxes as well.

The problem with small storage tins, jars and crocks is they make a dusty shelf that I have to clean. Also, they look like witchery and I am getting to the age where people start questioning your state of mind, or whether you are safe or scary. My jars on the bookshelf and living room shelves have an alchemy look about them. And of course I feel an urge to de-clutter the especially small quantities.

Look, if I took the trouble to save something, I had a reason. This isn't cleaning out crap, some of these bits are teas that are a crime to simply throw away. Leftovers of beengcha I broke up and crocked, vendor gifts and samples, maybe a tea that needed airing or time to develop more.

What do you do with small quantities of tea? If you are a disciplined sort of drinker, maybe you drink up a beeng and move to the next one. Over the years of having a blog, however, at least several times a year I am trying new things so I don't stick to one thing for long.

I really dislike loose tea in my storage unless I can jar it up. I think I can make some progress this year clearing out at least a few things. So, my 2024 goal is drink up smaller amounts of "tinned" or small "crocked" tea, or at least check progress.

First up is the late 1980s Hunan Tian Jian heicha from Chawangshop that I last wrote about in 2016. This tea was a 25g quantity in a plastic bag sold in a small box. This zippy little tea had appreciable humidity, but some strength to the leaves, a true pot boiler at the end.

80s Hunan Tian Jian Heicha
Chawangshop.com

Initially I stored this in a vintage silver-lined pearwood caddy in the hopes of airing out the humidity from the plastic bag storage. But then I moved the tea from the caddy when I wanted the caddy for some old, random laochatou I accidentally molded over. My estimate is the Hunan heicha tea has had possibly 5 years in a porcelain tenmoku glazed tea jar.

The glazed tea caddy did nothing to dissipate the humidity in the tea. Still a good tea underneath the basement flavors. It was a tough call to make putting it in glazed porcelain because this is a more preserving type of jar than an airing jar. For simple airing, a clay jar would have been better, but the fear is the clay either sucking out too much flavor and aroma, or imparting a clay taste. Sigh, so I went with a drier, more preservationist solution which I think many of you would choose for an 80s tea. Err on the side of caution.

My son joined me on the session, and he said the basement humidity was too much for his enjoyment. Really the tea hasn't aired much at all, clearly the jar is too conservative. All right, so if I want any point of progress this year on the remaining tea, I am going aggressive.

So, I baked the tea at 250F (120C) for about 10 minutes in a small oven on a metal sheet pan. I have discussed this low-heat method in other posts in the past as a way to deal rather swiftly with bringing humidity levels down. A second session with the tea was much better balanced with the humidity still there but not overwhelmingly so. I have photo'd the tea before, not much to see with dark shou color to the brew.

These leaves are stronger than any other heicha I have, culminating with a final boil in a pan, if you like. I might do 3g sessions on the maybe 15g I have left. It's an 80s tea, you can't toss it, and it is just a must to keep as a learning experience. Back in the jar it goes. No stash progress, per se, but I have attended to the tea, enjoyed a bit more of it, so it now has a bit of hot love.

Last summer I ordered white2tea's new 2022 Five Pile Laochatou, remembering the excellent batch they had back in...wait, in 2014? Wow, that long ago! That chatou was insane, which is why the new batches last year are a must-try.

I discontinued my w2t tea club early last fall after piling up 3 unopened club boxes. Instead, I placed an order for this lao cha tou and a new Arbor Red hongcha beeng. I like the tea club and would love to keep it going, which keeps my temptation to tea shop in check but it is just irresponsible to let boxes pile up. Probably will resub in spring for a taste of the new teas. Instead, I will just tea shop and get a couple of things I know I want, and the Arbor Red was a re-up.

After I made the purchase, I asked Mr. Murray about the cha tou. "Nothing like the 2014," he said. "This one doesn't have any of the same leaves as before."

This shou-chunk tea is from 5 piles of varying shou batches ranging from light fermentation to full fermentation, with the batches ranging from 2016-2020. The tea costs $33 for $250g. White2tea has a slightly less expensive cha tou batch, 2021 Wood Chip which purports to risk the odd detritus that didn't get sorted out, and is a different tea.

By further contrast, Yunnan Sourcing has 2014 Taetea laochatou 100g brick, two of these will set you back $38 plus China shipping. Yunnan Sourcing's own 2014 200g brick is priced $51.25. You can still get their 2012 if you want to pay $61.50, and choices from other factories including a super cute, but pricey batch sold in a clay tea jar, 3 jars of 60g each is 180g for $90 or so, and risking jar breakage. Wouldn't stop me, but I am not exactly a practical buyer. You can go cheaper than Taetea as well with other choices at Yunnan Sourcing.

In general, cha tou tea is easy-going to brew, easy on the caffeine buzz. It ships well, travels in luggage neatly, and is optimal for precision dosing. One can gongfu or throw a couple chunks in a large mug and just keep topping up the water. Honestly if I travel again, I am taking a small lozenge tin with a few chunks of cha tou.

So, Mr. Murray's Five Pile is decidedly mid-range in pricing, you are paying more elsewhere for further aged versions. With some light 2020 fermentation here we have something to age, the question is does anyone last long with saving cha tou? Mostly this style is fermented to the point of leathery leaves and that is the case here. Fully fermented with chunks of more slimy green. That sounds bad, but this is one of the softest brews I have had in awhile.

Cha tou takes time to release the juices, but once opening up with hot boiling water, they go on forever. I did a cold rinse first, then a hot rinse, brewing in my black Jian Shui clay pot from Crimson Lotus Tea, but nothing fishy or cloudy or challenging anywhere in this tea. Nothing tricky to brew around. Steeps 1-3 the tea isn't at full strength, even if you steam the leaves in-between. Four through six were the money steepings. The profile is the opposite of a straight up Bulang, this tea is not punchy but just subtle shou. It's not even funky.

All the brews look like this.

Now, with five batches in here, a single session is probably not representative of the tea as a whole. I didn't measure the grams. But lord these things brewed a week for me. The tea has a deceiving color, dark brown and thick, but rather mild overall. No port wine or mushroom. I drank 3 brews at once in a much larger cup. The tea has some action on the tongue, 3 brews is very mild caffeine for me. I had to go 6 steepings to get a puerh buzz on.

This is wonderful grandma tummy tea. I would serve this without hesitation to 85 year old frail nuns. The tea has full color and thickness, but not much strong flavor after brew six, just a mineral finish, and a bit of bitter, a teabag of hong is more acrid than this. I kind of want more strength, but I under-leafed a bit for the pot, or over-watered. The color of the brew looks heavier than the tea actually is to drink. I would want a salty crisp rice snack to accompany this, or maybe a crisp flatbread with a bit of aged hard cheese.

Great tea for an all-nighter like this blog writing session, keeps me in the zone without curdling my stomach after it wears off. An easy office brew, dump in the boiling water and good to go mild caffeine without being tea-drunk for a meeting. Been awhile since I have had a tea that I could easily recommend to beginners or sensitive stomach people. Most everything I drink is tea only a puerh person doing storage would like, and not for newbie guests. Like, I have no guests...but to a point.

Twelve steepings and a few days in, the tea is brewing dark, but needs pushing for flavor. I really feel I could go up to fifteen steepings for sure, maybe more. Some of the nuggets didn't open. One chunk is so rubbery and firm it doesn't separate, I can't hand-pry it apart. You know what that means, another pot boiler.

I went with a high water ratio in the enamel pan, can this tea put out enough? Yes it can, quite easily after five minutes of boiling. While I waited, I thought about re-recommending an enamel-coated pan for tea boiling. This is superior, in my mind, over boiling tea in any form of bare metal. Enamel adds no mineral or metallic properties.

This is the water before boiling.

Get thyself an enamel pan. I amused myself while awaiting the boiled tea by checking eBay, might as well go vintage on enamel pans. OH STOPPPP, look at these cute choices!

Made an offer on the first Japanese one. I went $30. I don't need it, the seller hasn't responded, so you can snipe it on a BIN or lower offer if you want. I did not scroll down further into the cuteness of enamel pans, as clearly we have a danger zone.

After the pan boil.

My tea turned out stronger than I needed it to be, the tang is back on the tongue, and the bottom of the cup gets a slight bitter edge. Fully rolling now on caffeine and theanine. Also, pour out your pan tea over the sink so you don't splash everywhere. Drank up the whole pan, the tea is good cold, has a hongcha note. Again, nothing off-putting whatsoever. I boiled too early, should have gongfu'd longer.

After pan boil one, wet smears
show still more in it.

Awesome tea for the budget and sensitive folks, I am keeping this for my dodgy tummy days, and I must do another boil. Next up I have another planned tea review for you. And then throughout this year I hope to bring back a few older blog teas and update any progress.

Pu-erh Nation

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 09:07:00 +0000

original map by chinatouristmaps.com

A loose leaf tea fan eventually discovers puerh tea, this is inevitable. People who last past that first gongfu invariably start an online search to learn more about this type of tea, and eventually they fall headlong into the rabbit hole of the hobby. The rabbit holes are full of enthusiasts, elite gamers of paper wrapped camellia sinensis assamica x assamica discs, with the goal of sticking a landing, and placing a trophy into one’s personal home storage. We fill forums with shipping problems, brewing problems, lying asshole sellers, fomo, rumors and snotty hubris.

Beyond the shopping is another warren of puerh-only groundhog trails, running through countries around the world for even more privately-held elite tea, in an unending cycle of spring harvests and shou piles. Heavily sated with buying, we turn to storage matters in another flurry of watering holes filled with members of our kind. We side-eye someone knowingly when they order tea in a shop and sigh over the choices. If you catch a sideways glance, then you just know, like a tap tap under a bathroom stall of mold, pubic hair, corn kernels and plastic ties. Takes a particular breed of tea-human willing to brush all that off and swallow it anyway, all the while complaining about the fungal hoarding stigma, wafting like a wad of wet tissue on the shoe of the tea social sphere, flopping behind us as we wet-knee walk.

Yeah, we get it. We are insufferable to live with, in our houses full of broken refrigerators, coolers and crocks, with the crunch of tea leaves underfoot requiring one to wear slippers and pick up chunks larger than a dime. Our pets choose our tea, it’s lame, we know that. Complain about the stereotypes all you like. Sorta like Janet sings, so we are one Pu-erh Nation, irrespective of national boundaries, looking for a better way of tea life. In truth, all the tunnels of the earth lead back to Yunnan, because digging a hole to China is, in fact, a real thing.

Blah, blah they always say, but we are in a golden age of Puerh tea. Because we are all still here, from the early internet pioneer tea writers and forum humpers, and the vendors too, gods bless us everyone.

At the tip of the spear is our Hero, our very first hero, David Lee Hoffman, who is still defending his cave storage puerh hoard from the Evils of the local city and county governments trying to take his property, and demolish his incredible, fully self-sustaining and waste recycling home facility, including water recycling. He is the first of us to have a Wikipedia entry and a decade of press behind his struggle to prevent the hoard from the horde. I bet half of you never heard of him, and the other half doesn’t know he is still selling tea and has 8 pages of listings! Get over there to his website, support our Brother and try his storage, buy something from him, okay? He has plenty of old stuff in that list. (Don’t be a dick about it either, don’t ask about the stuff he isn’t selling, that is just rude.) Thoughts and prayers and dollars are better.

We still have so many of the early vendors, apart from the great factories of course. Houde is still adding teas. I know that some like Scott at Yunnan Sourcing and probably Cloud would love to retire, but how do you retire from tea? No one has. People seem to make and sell tea until they drop. Give your favorite vendor some love instead of complaints for a change, put up some of their tea on your socials that you particularly like and help out so their families can rest a little.

Still can buy here (official re-seller)

Our favorite factories and boutique purveyors are still around too, and more accessible than ever. I cannot complain when tea factories like Chen Sheng Hao open up in Canada and sell Lao Ban Zhang. I can order from stateside and overseas tea shops who are happy to ship. We don’t know if nations outside the Pu-erh Nation will survive which can change our situation at any moment, so I appreciate all that we have now.

A Liu Bao chocolate bar!
PLUS 50g bag white2tea laochatou,
oh, and the pretty cup, all here.

We know that once inside the Pu-erh Nation, there is no way out. Not if you expect to keep your tea intact. I have learned I cannot stop, not entirely. In this golden age, we still have all our writers with us, and our best forum chatters, and more camaraderie than ever before. We are making efforts amongst all of us to look up forums and articles in languages we don’t speak, to try and connect and use translation tools, because we have more respect for one another or we got more snobby or we got tossed out of home, or we want in on the group buys. Sing it, people.

Randomness

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 06:25:00 +0000

Lately I don't really have a tea drinking strategy. I start with a ragged impulse coming from my core of tea neediness, a craving of whatever puerh caffeine buzz I can get, stumbling to shelves, crocks and boxes to find something. A random sampling of teas, a bit of new tea, a wtf is this tea, or nope, I just drank that a week ago. Or something closer to desperation, because I am unraveling, or already cooked, taken apart, or she took me apart in a sentence, my provincial superior. Oh, yes, you can guess, and this relates to my Letters to the Prioress set of posts, the most recent one, for those curious. In the mists I am, and I lose track of time for days at a time, letting random thoughts flow until after dinner when I need that cuppa.

Usually the need is partly specific. One day recently I really wanted a sheng for the ragged edges of my sanity, and I saw an envelope from my white2tea club boxes. Oh good, I will have this, it is a 2022 Lich Tears sample. I don't know anything about this tea nor why I have it. Club box? Something I ordered? I open the envelope, oops it's a shou, do I go back and start over with choosing a tea? Never mind, I will just drink it, who cares. Pulled out 9g off the chunks.

The first three steepings after two rinses (young shou or dodgy shou I rinse twice) are a little cloudy. Okay, so the shou is not completely done, it's not totally fermented, and some bacteria has the upper hand currently. What is going on here, so I look up the tea on the website and just about fall over at the price. $225 for a 200g shou? Get outta town.

A sheng price for shou, okay...so just in the interest of investigating the price tag I will drink through it, but this tea needs more time. Long time readers might remember my shou-making series of posts, as I have made two batches of shou now with only a little bit remaining of my first batch.

I see on the listing that the fermentation effort here is meant to be a lighter fermentation with fresh leaves added at the end. By "lighter," I mean the tea is pulled from the pile fermentation a bit early with still some green left in the tea. The intent is to add more depth and dimension in flavor by natural aging the remaining green and hopefully get a more nuanced shou. As you know, a fully fermented shou is a bit one-dimensional, comforting as a beverage, but nothing to grab the attention.

Steep 3

So, the cloudiness is to be expected at this stage. My first batch of shou finished up much more cloudy than this, and completely cleared in two years. Fermentation is like a bit of a battle between types of bacteria and fungi. A lot of cloudiness means a bacteria has the upper hand in the fight at the moment, and perhaps bacteria you don't want is introduced when turning the pile or even present at the start in the maocha. My first three steepings with the cloudiness have a sour edge consistent with the microbe battle going on inside the leaves.

Okay, so the tea clears up after steep three or so, and steeps three to six have some thickness to the brew, but still sour. Steeps 5 and 6 were fairly bitter. Once I start on steep 7, not much sour left and a sweet bit of cherry emerges. The tea tastes more like shou now, a little bit funky, not overboard though. For a light fermentation, this tea is on the edge of "okay to sell." And that mostly explains the price tag. I like the thickness of the liquor and where this tea is at. The caffeine level is okay, I did not get much of a qi sensation from the session, however. But that could be me and shou...

Steep 6, lookin good, hon

I think the price here is Paul not wanting to sell this really, except to people who know what they are getting with light fermentation. The tea will have stages to go through to get a fully fermented shou. Essentially, you are finishing the tea yourself through slower storage. But of course that is what we are doing with sheng, too. So, this isn't for the newbie tea customer. In fact, the newbie is going to howl with complaints over this level of unfinished ferment. The early cups will turn off a new person, but maybe intrigue someone with more experience. So, he is looking to avoid those newbs. Also, he clearly likes something about this tea, partly because he participated in watching and turning the tea over the few weeks it sat piled and covered.

I got nine decent steepings, and the tenth I had to let the brewing go for several minutes just to get a good cup. I tried an eleventh, but it just was too light a cup, lightly colored water. I debated drinking the sample up completely, because I now have maybe two smaller sessions left in the bag. I guess given the price tag I need to be fair to the tea and store it another year and then see what I think of it.

If I have to decide on whether to recommend the tea, I say keep on walking, son, if you are new. I can recommend a sample of it, and I am fairly sure Paul would prefer you just buy a sample. Anyone rather new to puerh looking to try a light fermentation shou, you can find these at less expensive prices like at Yunnan Sourcing or Chawangshop. In fact, comparing this one to a less expensive tea is a good way to judge for yourself.

For my next session, I really needed that sheng, and some edema relief, so I decided to have a session of the 2016 Hekai from Chawangshop, because it really takes the edge off calcium channel blocker edema, and I have not had this tea at all this year. I keep this cake in its wrapper and then in a burlap beeng bag that Chawangshop included with an order. (Beeng bag being puerh nation code knock on the bathroom stall, recognize your fellow sheng addict from afar and salud to you, mate.)

This half-consumed beeng has darkened considerably since I last had it. I might have two others in storage someplace. You can still get it from Chawangshop for $48 for 200g, I think. Most of the darkening is oxidation, because I let this sit out in its beeng bag. I don't care how much it ages, or if it ages. The tea is medicinal for edema, as I have written before, and I didn't measure the grams, dump into the gaiwan.

The brew is much thicker than I remember and far sweeter. I liked this tea for the savory, almost umami flavor. I don't recall the tea as very sweet and floral like the first few cups are in this session. Maybe it was, but I don't think so? I mainly liked it because it doesn't have any cloying nonsense, straight up green veggie style puerh. The tea gets there finally, at about steep 5. Now I am getting the tomato vine acrid flavor, the smell of a juicy daisy stem after picking. Why do I like that better than the floral sweetness? I guess the tomato/daisy just tastes like summer, in a fall season of regrets.

The tea still does me fine on the edema, I stop feeling swollen in my feet after three cups. The brew goes from light orange to progressively more dark yellow. I did about five steepings and stopped for the day.

Tea got more yellow with brewing.
What you see is oxidation.

On the next night, the green leaves darkened with oxidation which is okay, but the damp leaves have a mushiness to them. I take out a leaf and rub it, turns to mush. I know it will be a little cloudy for having sat out overnight, as green as it still is. But also, the leaves just don't have that strength or quality that you pay big money for. The tea is not money tea. That's not what Chawangshop goes for. Their stated goal is decent tea at more the low to mid-range price tier, and that is exactly what you get. This Hekai has a unique effect on me, so it hits the sweet spot in body and wallet. But I am okay with getting three to six decent steepings and just dumping it out of the gaiwan.

Still need that sheng itch scratched, and of course I know I have been away from the blog for awhile, so I decide to find another tea to write about, along with the Hekai, so something I have written about previously, as an update on the tea. I require a sheng that will get under all the inner tension, that stirs up the bottom of my stew pot, so to speak. That means a dirty tuocha is in order.

The 2005 Menghai tuo from Yunnan Sourcing has appeared in my blog off and on, and sits atop other tuos in storage because I tend to reach for it over all my other tuos when I need bar stool tea to do me a nasty. Big chunk with a heavy duty puerh pick, full on-compression starting to loosen a little at 18 years of age. I bought it at 8-9 years old. (I really need to try those 2009 Jin Hao Feng Huang phoenix shou tuos and see if they are starting to resemble that excellent 2004 version I would kill small children for.)

Anyway, load up the gaiwan with a too-bigga hunka-chunka and let's go! Oh yes this is a smoky tea, I remember that, and has darkened a bit more with age. I frown to myself at the wastage of tea with a compressed tuo when you break a piece off it, lots of dust and bits.

At least 9 steepings in, big chonk still.

For storage notes-to-self, the tuo sits loose in its well-torn wrapper in a crock with other similar tuos. The lid on this small crock isn't quite flush, so I have at least a 2 mm gap on one side of the crock lid. Thus air and light getting in to cause the dark oxidation this tuo now has. Doesn't really bother me, but if I wanted to avoid that quality, then I need to eliminate that light getting in and maybe cover the whole crock with a dark towel. I can't really shuffle the positioning of the tuos in there because they barely all fit, although better now that I took more off the 05 Menghai. The resulting oxidation is also what you see in a tong, the top beeng in the stack will have oxidation on its upper surface, while the bottom beeng will show the same on its underside, compared to the beengs in the tong's middle.

First three steepings are smoke and stick kindling wood, by steep 5 I really get that pipe tobacco juiciness, that tobacco-from-humidor-storage wood smell. The tea hits its stride in steeps 7-10, this is the point where the pipe tobacco eases off just enough that other dimensions shine through, like aged wood barrel, smoked ham and the minerally smell of rain on asphalt. This is exactly the stage where the flavors blend into something that most resembles aged scotch whiskey, I am reminded why I like this tea and return to it again and again. Bar stool sheng. I get to steep 8 and I am pleasantly tea drunk, the stage where I can't stop, where if I drank booze I am gonna get in trouble.

And yes, I am in trouble because I am doomcart scrolling Yunnan Sourcing after typing in 2005 Menghai to see what comes up. Lots of teas. Yunnan Sourcing surfing is like that girl you will be stuck with if you take her home from the bar, when you wake up to find your wallet is gone. Trouble and more trouble, don't do it, I click out.

Yeah... my beloved tuo settling in now providing a boozy warmth. Doing what I need and reminding me why puerh is the pinnacle of tea, and puerh people are the ones who understand it even if we cannot always explain. If someone doesn't get it, we don't care. ;)

I am reminded of how many random variables puerh tea has. Randomness starts with the picking and selection of leaves, yes they are graded, but who knows what gets mixed in, tossed in, a little autumnal, different leaves brought in by a couple of pickers thrown in the blend, or maybe just to stretch to get a last tong done, with two beengs hardly resembling the others. Randomness in the sha qing, somebody glancing at their phone and the heat goes a little too long, but never mind let's press it anyway. Randomness in what wrapper got put on, something left over from the 90s, another tea entirely. Randomness in where and how the tea is stored from start to finish, the microbes from anywhere and everywhere, including in my house. Randomness in when I add moisture, and how much. Randomness in whatever I ate that day and burp up along with the tea fumes.

We pick and analyze every aspect of our tea as we store it, trying to find variables that explain why someone has a really good tea, so we can replicate it, but we mostly cannot. Even if our storage is good, a gazillion decisions conscious and unconscious have happened already to the tea before we got hold of it. Someone got just the right amount of wood smoke in that 05 tuo, somehow. And every year is a new year with different tea on top of everything else, and none of us puerh people know everything that happens in the garden.

Okay okay

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 16:55:00 +0000

I am still here in the asylum of tea madness and increasingly disorganized. Some of you are emailing, thank you for checking in. Overall, things are okay with me, though I am suffering more and more with don’t-give-a-flyingfuck-itis, which a privilege of retirement. Not gonna lie though, I fell off the blog wagon, and everything else mostly, as two years nursing an elderly cat along with its accompanying sleep deprivation ground in day after day to the point where all I wanted was sleep. If you have had a cat with hyperthyroid disorder you know what it is, the animal is manic with hunger, never sleeps, and the more you try and feed it the more it comes out like water on the other end.

I say the details are ugly, and I tried to convince the vet that the cat was beyond needing to be put out of its misery, but the kidney tests were still where the vet wouldn’t do it, so I paid him in tea and took the cat home, whereupon within a fortnight the cat took matters into his own hands to stop the pills and regulated feedings and just took off. That was 3 months ago. I don’t think he made it, but oddly a young cat with the same face has started checking us out. That one looks healthy and belongs to someone.

But five months ago, in the midst of feedings every two hours like an infant that never reaches the 6 month sleep-through-the-night mark, it’s time for even fewer hours of sleep. That’s right. Been 7 years since Mr. B. went off the rails. Mr. B. is an itinerant musician I have written about in the past, he lives with us from time to time, usually several years at a stretch, then he can’t stand it and descends into drinking and mania.

To be fair to Mr. B., since his last episode at the start of the pandemic, he has been stellar. Best I’ve ever seen him, these past three years. We got hit by a tornado, I’ve been sick, had surgery, the cats sick, all kinds of stresses on the daily and our household pulled together in strength through all that. Mr. B. is more than his worst days and he ran errands and we all worked to patch up the damage on the house and deal with the ex’s wrecked car. (Ex is still in Guangzhou, his leg got banged up and he’s in a cast.) Anyway, Mr. B. was a rock-solid citizen with us through all the craziness in the world since 2020.

Until he wasn’t. Things got bad. As always, cousin Greg phones.

“Do you want a Marshall amp such-and-such in your house? Because he’s here at the guitar shop and he wants an amp that I’m telling you will blow the windows out of your house, and I’m checking with you first,” Greg says.

“Nope I really don’t.”

“He calls me 10 times a day. I can’t answer the phone,” Greg says in what is literally a repeat of last time.

“That’s not bad, Ron says he got 28 calls one day last week. I get 12 a day and I just live downstairs.”

Mr. B. brought home the amp anyway. This time he got more focused on me and Dear Son than on his music career. Like laser-focused. When he’s manic and drinking he only needs 3-4 hours sleep a day and the rest of the time he makes it impossible for me. Thankfully Son grew up with a musician dad and sleeps through anything.

Neighbors fenced us in. Btw, there is a bluff
off in the distance you can’t see.
Canada wildfire smoke this summer.

But we became Mr. B’s arch nemeses and he went on to terrorize the neighborhood. My next door neighbor Dale put up an 8 foot tall fence “so that I don’t have to deal with him every time I come out of the house,” Dale said. My neighbor on the other side Tony put up an 8 foot tall fence the last time Mr. B. went off, which is where Dale got the idea.

I fully expected 10-12 weeks but it was 5 months, starting February. Since then, Mr. B. got in two car accidents drinking and driving. The state of Minnesota drove him to the Wisconsin line after one joyride culminating in a crash fight with a guy in a pickup, and the cops said don’t come back, a similar deal Mr. B. has with the state of Tennessee, no more Opry for him.

The cops showed up here aplenty, the clip above was on my birthday. Another neighbor filed a harassment complaint, so the cop showed up for that. Drunken rages at all hours.

I got another friend with the same issues who also likes to come after me.

I had two of them on me and no sleep to speak of. “How can you stand it?” Dale said. I literally didn’t care. Mentally ill people don’t bother me which is why I worked in psychiatry for so long. I’m not fond of drunks, though. The drinking got bad.

Man, all I wanted was sleep, like to sleep for months. I didn’t care about anything, I was zombie living. But dear Son and the neighbors could not cope. Then in July, Mr. B. decided he wanted some new tires for a vehicle and didn’t pay rent. Nothing I can do at that point, apart from evict him. You have to go to court now even if you don’t do a lease and even when the unwanted guest in your home refuses to leave.

Mr. B’s room when it got bad.
That’s a full plate of burnt toast.

Pandemic-era law that needs to go, in my opinion, and it cost me $175 in tea money that I won’t do again. Pulled the cop reports, and Mr. B.’s non-stop binge drinking party of 5 months came to an end. He left the night before the court date. He’s up at the junkyard now. His friend will let him stay indefinitely. It’s in the countryside, in the middle of nowhere. I been there once and don’t think I can find it again, quite honestly.

So that is how life gets on the way of my tea hobby. Last year sometime or maybe this year I dunno, but I re-upped on my white2tea monthly tea sub. Part of the idea was to be on a sort of no-buy, and the tea sub is the way I tried to channel my non-tea-shopping. Don’t look at the websites, because I have my tea box coming in the mail. Actually the truth is I wanted whatever the tea was the month I re-upped. But I don’t remember what that tea was. I don’t know what is in any of my tea boxes and some of them I haven’t even opened. I’m not going to review any of these teas, OolongOwl does that much better than I ever could.

Mostly this tea sub has worked to keep me from tea shopping. I haven’t really bought anything since I re-upped, and I haven’t even looked at Yunnan Sourcing for three months now, the longest I’ve gone in 15 years, though I did look at Houde recently because he had new teas up.

Buying hongcha doesn’t count as tea buying, just saying.

The disorganization gets worse. The tea photo above at the top of the post was supposed to have the tea I’m currently drinking, not even sure what it is in the envelope, and also a 2021 Arbor Red sample I haven’t cracked into, but I put them someplace to do the photo and then couldn’t find them minutes later. I don’t know what that tong is, I meant to dust it off but forgot to do that too. I might think I’m senile but the lack of sleep can do it. I’m actually sleeping now, we’ve had a few weeks of peace.

So when people start emailing me, okay I need to start writing and meant to do sort of an unboxing and at least get the packages open, but can’t be arsed today. I’ll just write this and get it on the blog. Probably the most interesting thing about the tea photo is the Lins Ceramics water boiler which I’ve turned into a hongcha pot. Quite accidentally, my son wanted a tea and I needed something for two people. Turned out Lins Purion is excellent for hongcha, normally I save Purion for nasty unidentified aged puerh, and this is a water kettle now turned into hongcha teapot.

I did find out that Lins is now shipping to the US, though it is expensive. I really would not look at their website if you have a teaware problem, the pots they are making now are so gorgeous and I think I might get the clay water dispenser. They even have a clay coffee drip thing. Whatever those are called. The site isn’t secure, but I know that wouldn’t stop you from looking. You are welcome.

Cwyn

Pandemic Puerh

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 15:33:00 +0000

My primary relationship in life is my puerh tea collection, and the rest of the time I maintain an appropriate facade of caring about anything or anyone else. My dear tea and I endured the pandemic, and we have not yet had Covid. Far more real at the moment is the post-pandemic economy, and this is shifting my relationship with my tea somewhat.

Just over a year ago, I was startled to read more details about the emergency economy during the lockdown in Shanghai, and how within 5 days the most valuable currency anyone had was reportedly Coca-Cola. Maybe that’s anecdotal, but illuminating nevertheless and adding a dimension now to my tea collection. I don’t like the word collection anymore, my teas are primarily ones I want to drink, not merely collect.

My tea started feeling like a kind of trade good. One that almost no one else around here has. Coffee started getting very expensive, but seems eased lately. In a situation where coffee gets scarce, my cheap teas might be worth more.

I got a trade relationship going with my local vet. Both my cats have health conditions, and the vet/prescriptions costs are such that I noticed how quickly he got his roof repaired after the tornado hit last summer, whereas mine is still patched and damaged. Also, he’s not a great vet, but has a redeeming quality of an aura of acquiring tastes about him. And he’s a yang type, so I got that covered. Started bringing him tea, for no reason, really more exasperation because the vet part is just not good. Finally I stop trying to be normal and go the eccentric that I am. He’s getting tea. After a year of that I got a free kidney test for the cat who needs to be put down, but test ok so he won’t do it, and the cat finally ran away in madness.

That’s the one

So far I brought over fu brick, Lu An, Jeong Jae Yuen’s marvelous batch, shui xian and green puerh (the diuretic kind). In March I thought to myself, I always want spring tea come July, why not plan early this year, and subbed to white2tea for the spring cake. When the vet wouldn’t put the cat down I gave him that tea. I was giving up, sort of. I should have just booked a spa before giving away tea like I have. This is old lady behavior for sure and someone needs to put a stop to it. My son is afraid of me, so who will?

But really, people set up card tables at the Farmer’s Market here and sell yellow gourds they grow, and you can’t eat them, and nobody needs any except as Halloween decoration, so they just end up at the food pantry for free because, hey, nobody can’t waste them and the ones who need the food also need to act grateful.

What is stopping me from setting up with my tuos? Before the pandemic I thought about doing a class at the library on puerh and a lobby case display, the library is always looking for people. But now, puerh tea would never fly on the be-serious level of the library, but could positively flourish as survival currency for the aesthetically desperate…although…if I brought the crocks along the Mennonite ladies would give a look for sure, and hey, I could hand out samples. I got loads of shou balls back from my Fermentation Fest days.

Kombucha won out here on the high end, the library-level side, and puerh is probably more useful on the everyday neighbor side of things instead. It’s social currency but in a real way you can use it wean off coffee.

Oh. And I’m back on coffee. The same impulse that drove me to give away my spring cake drove me into buying a cheap plastic Keurig and coffee pods from the Bent-n-Dent store for 5 bucks a box. I must be depressed but I don’t feel anything really. I can complete the impression by adding I’m cutting my hair. They say a certain amount of cluttered chaos leads to a cluttered mind, but it’s probably a tool, one that I’ve always used to straighten my mind against it, you play an A and I’ll tune all five of my other strings. On harmonics.

Yeah, I guess I’m ok. Hope you are too…

Broken Cup Teahouse Yancha

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 04:59:00 +0000

Back in October 2022, I caught a tweet by Max Falkowitz saying a friend of his opened a new tea pop-up called Broken Cup Teahouse, please offer some support. I’m happy to try a new vendor once, so I ordered 30g of a “1993 Old Style Narcissus,” a Wuyi Yancha. Along with the order I got a free 5g of 2021 Dark Honey, a hongcha. I probably should have got round to drinking these teas sooner, because the Yancha is sold out now.

2021 Dark Honey Black/Red

I drank the hongcha first, all 5g in the Kamjove gravity steeper, as a casual morning cuppa. I brewed 3 steeps per day for 3 days, so a total of 9 steeps. The longevity is impressive, the tea could have gone more, but after 3 days I decided to toss the leaves, not being sure I should really keep them longer.

The profile is Yunnan style, with a hot cocoa note start and then red tea tannins. It’s a pleasant enough tea.

The Narcissus Yancha was more interesting, I think I paid $30-ish for it? So maybe a $1/g. I brewed 5 grams of this too, also over 3 days.

“1993 Old Style Narcissus”

I’m not a Yancha expert, and all the Wuyi Yancha I’ve had in the past were 7 years or younger. So I don’t have any way to judge the stated age, but I bring puerh skepticism to the session and I don’t take 1993 literally. Wuyi teas are rife with fakery issues similar to puerh, they are pricey and not enough real Wuyi style teas actually exist to create all the those sold as Wuyi. So yeah.

The Narcissus is a very comforting tea to drink if you like oolong profiles and a bit of damp in your tea. The storage on the tea is very good, it has a faded wet note that for me characterizes natural storage, along with a not-unpleasant dusty closet front. But I didn’t rinse the tea, I normally don’t rinse Yancha. Might be ideal to rinse in terms of the steep quality, but the storage is also more obvious without the rinse.

I don’t know the provenance of this tea, but I can dream up a guess. The faded roast, dusty closet, and retired damp seem like a tea stored in bags or a box or basket, in a shop or warehouse for years, where nobody currently working can remember how long that tea has been there. “Yeah, it’s been here as long as I’ve worked here,” and they add up the years of the workers and after that make up any year for the tea.

The tea has nothing green left in it, and requires a hard boil to get it to open. The storage and a prune note are there along with the faded roast, my first 3 steeps were flash brews, but then the tea seemed tired for three brews and I needed to really extend the time. Brewing a minute per steep I got 7, 8 and 9 steeps no problem.

The tea having no green in it does not get stewed such that it sticks to the bottom of the gravity steeper. It stays fluffy. The gravity steeper is probably not the best vessel, it needs ceramic to boost the temp for longer. On my next session, I will switch over to a ceramic teapot or a gaiwan.

Aside from that, it’s a Yancha. A comforting tea, but not as interesting as a puerh tea, and brews faster than a rolled oolong. After 9 steeps the pot had a tart cherry aroma and mineral notes.

All that is just information, because Broken Cup Teahouse had some 90s puerh in the shop that was sold out before I hit the shop. Seems like this vendor is a good one to bookmark, to check out if you are looking for something of a lite snack in terms of tea.

Signs You Drank Too Damn Much Puerh for Far Too Long

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Mon, 30 Jan 2023 13:54:00 +0000

1. Someone brews you a teabag, and you taste the bag.

2. “What does it say on the box?” registers as, “what box?”

3. Do you like mushrooms? Means not pizza.

4. You would never brush your teeth before puerh, and depending upon what you drank maybe not after.

5. Still no room on any shelf, anywhere in the house.

6. In the event of severe supply chain issues, I’d still rather have all that tea than gold under the floor.

7. I’m paranoid of anyone now who says they like tea.

8. I’m paranoid of anyone who says they have a tea name, date or original wrapper. Don’t care who you are.

9. I’m paranoid of anyone who says they want to come over.

10. Tell the doctor you drink tea and they think either tea bags or green tea and tell you “good job,” but if they really knew, they would up my beta blocker and run a pesticide test.

11. I’m paranoid of anyone who tests the tea, but for no reason I tend to trust the tea more and order it anyway.

12. I tried to entirely stop buying tea. I’m paranoid of anyone who succeeds.

13. I’m trying to force a tasting of a yancha that I did order and pay for and I can’t do it. Three months I tried and failed.

14. The “I need a new kettle” is never done.

15. Everyone I live with can fuck right off.

The Failed Endeavor of Charles Buell Anderson

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 21:37:00 +0000

Charles Buell Anderson
Photo findagrave.com

This is one of those stories I have to get down. I am divesting myself of the shit that happens that you cannot make up. In this rather bewildering story, I managed to meet a worldwide cult leader and walked away mostly unawares. Wisconsin is full of cult-y people; actually the whole world is, and has ever been so since Adam said hello to the snake and decided to listen to it. I run into weirdos like this all the time, and the story is mostly the same.

Back around 1993 or so I had a part time job in social work, not full-time because my son was a toddler. I was awfully broke and needed money, and saw a job ad in the newspaper looking for a "Set Painter." You just don't see art jobs in the paper ever. I was volunteering in various theatres doing set painting for free but mainly for the cast party invites, which guaranteed free food and drink every week for at least a couple of months while a show was on.

The Set Painter job posting required dropping off a vita and an example of one's work. At the time, I was doing my own art work of illuminated manuscripts in a gothic French Anjou style, something I picked up after growing disillusioned with abstract expressionism, an effort to start over my shit painting life and copy the art history I refused to do back in college. Now, I had most recently made a large manuscript for a friend, a secular piece of Henry II with some quote by him, because my friend had just acted that historical figure in the play “The Lion in Winter." So I brought in this manuscript as part of my application.

The man looking to hire worked out of one of those early mid-century modern decaying offices with plywood paneling, where you will often see a pair of deer antlers hanging on the wall. I poked fun at these places with a drawing of the "Elk Motel" in my Sommelier story. I can't remember the business title at this office, something home-related, heating or inspections. The office sharing the building was an insurance agent. I left my art work and got a call about an hour later, asking if I could come back for an interview. I could.

At the plywood office, I met a man in his late 30s wearing a white, long-sleeved dress shirt without a jacket. He told me that my art work was very impressive and wanted to show me the job. We left the 60s building and went to another building on the next block which more recently became a dance school for kids. It is a decent sized space that looks a bit black box theatre-like.

The guy said he wanted some backdrops made for some furniture he planned to photograph and sell, nothing to do with his office business. I saw furniture in the space which resembled the kind of stuff the Bombay Company sold back then, British colonial fantasy. I said I could easily paint hanging backdrops, if he had rolls of canvas, or even bed sheets or wood. We went back to his office so I could retrieve my art work. He asked me a bit about my background.

"Why don't you come and have dinner with my family, and we can talk some more?" he said. I wish I could remember his name.

I said I had to pick up my son, that his dad was working a moonlight teaching job.

"Oh, just bring him along." Well, okay. Seemed like I had the job, so why not?

Picked up my kid and we drove back to the guy's office.

"We will just go in my car, you can leave yours here. Parking is an issue." In a city it certainly is.

I had the impression he lived nearby, so I got into his black 4 x 4 vehicle, which was a little “extra” back then. So far this guy added up in my mind as a B-level striver, with the cheap office, no suit jacket, 1980’s Bombay fantasy furniture and tastefully hormonal car.

But then he started driving on the freeway out of the city.

"Where are we going?" I was feeling a little apprehensive, though not too much. After all I worked with people with psychiatric illnesses all day long, the severe kind, people seriously dangerous. This guy didn't exactly add up to that, but still we were heading out of the city which is not a good a thing.

"Oh, it's not too far, we will be there shortly. I called my wife and she knows you will be with us for dinner."

We kept going and going, and nearly 40 nervous miles later he turned off the freeway and soon we were driving into forest, and then a gravel road. I could now understand the 4 x 4.

"We are almost there. By the way, the house we are renting belonged to two Catholic priests before."

Now that was certainly a strange thing to say. We literally were in the woods. Two priests renting a house in the middle of nowhere is dodgy.

The house surprisingly was a modern loft style house, a rather suburban professional look, better than his office, but again that B-level striver, or so I told myself. I don't mean to judge people but sheesh, it's not a moral thing so much as hoping the guy driving me and my kid into the dark forest isn't a serial killer. I also didn’t particularly understand B-level strivers, only because I worked entirely in non-profit service.

I met the wife, who seemed like a normal person and they had a 10 year old son who was watching Wheel of Fortune or something on the TV. The meal was ready to go, and the man said a prayer at the table which was not a formal one, but a spontaneous one. Okay, maybe Pentecostal or Evangelical, I thought to myself. We were only a few years post-Reagan back then, so it didn’t seem too weird.

Over dinner I tried to discuss ideas I had for his backdrops. I was thinking instead of the big canvas maybe more like a shoji screen, this would be cheaper and go with the furniture better than tacky canvas theatre drops. He just said "hm" to all that, and suddenly did not seem so interested in the project I was expecting to do.

I was asked more about my background etc., and he wanted to talk about the importance of his faith. He had already given away where he was with religion, and I tailor my responses to people asking. Most people like to ask about the nun stuff, but they usually want a very simple and easy to understand answer about it all. Too much and people literally glaze over in the eyeballs. So, depending on who asks I will answer in different ways.

This is not exactly a religious snobbery thing, it's actually the opposite. Mostly people are mildly curious, yet I could say some things about religious and clerical life that can seriously disturb them. (Just for starters, they had not clearly thought their house in the deep woods rented by priests to be the dark flag I thought it was.) It's like trying to explain your puerh hobby to people who say they have a tea collection too, and upon inquiry they have boxes of tea bags. It's not a puerh snobbery to avoid the details, it's that people glaze over and then feel like they don't know something about tea that they should know, and who needs that discomfort? They don't want it. It's just polite not to overdo.

I continued to try and engage this guy on the art work as he loaded the dishwasher after dinner. He said I could go into their formal living room, that two people were coming over to meet me.

The couple who then arrived were an older couple, looking around 70-ish. This was the man I later recognized as Charles Buell Anderson. I didn't know til later he had recently opened a church school in the Dells nearby called Endeavor Academy which is supposed to to teach the The Course on Miracles, a 1970s New Age-y book I considered trendy, the way theosophy was back in the 1930s. But Charles also allegedly thought he was Jesus in the flesh, and claimed to have already resurrected before actually dying.

They sat down and said how happy they were to meet with me, and how fortunate I am because a great opportunity awaited me. They seemed very vague. I was struck by how this man and, I supposed his wife, were sitting. They sat on the sofa like my mother's parents from Chicago did, this very 1950s city way of sitting at the edge of the cushion, knees pressed together and leaning forward to chat. A social posture that has mostly gone. My generation on down you see local men sit more spread open and leaning back with a confident and nonchalant machismo. My mother actually sat the same way on furniture as these people. I got the impression they were retired urban business people who were decently well off. I thought they must have gone to a lot of clubs and cocktail lounges in the old days, business socializing. That was the vibe.

Overall, these people were definitely better off than I at that point. I didn't have a dishwasher or a loft house. My Corolla car would never have made it on that dirt road. But apart from that, they seemed rather simple business people, at least in terms of religion mixing with business. By "simple" religion, I mean they probably didn’t have troves of lawyers fighting thousands of cases of child abuse while pretending it never happened and raking in millions in donations to support mansions in Italy. They asked me more about the religion stuff and I just kept up with very basic responses with my eye on my young son playing with the 10 year old who wanted to lend us a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles VHS tape. These people probably didn't have any interest in the details of a woman like me once attending diocesan deanery meetings.

I just couldn't figure out what these two older people really wanted. They said they were in business with this guy I met, and looked forward to working with me. They didn't exactly say right out what this meant. I assumed the younger man was their protege' maybe from a mutual church, and they were investing in the younger man’s business, or doing stock buys together, or maybe a pyramid scheme.

It was time to go back to the city and the older couple decided to ride along. We were told my son could borrow the Turtles tape.

On the way to the city, I sat in the back with the older couple. The job seemed like it was evaporating quickly, and I tried to check that.

"So, it looks like I will be doing this job, do you think?"

The woman just looked out the window with that vague expression again, and replied, "absolutely, he will take very good care of you," and something about the opportunity I had at hand. I can't tell you how many times in my life people have said things like this and it turns into nothing, like college professors saying they will write recommendation letters so you will "launch" into a fabulous job. Or maybe here is a restaurant people think is the best ever and we should really go there. Nothing splendid that people promise you ever ends up happening.

Back to my car, serial killers averted. In the coming days I waited for a phone call as to when I would start the new job, and of course I hear nothing but crickets. So I phoned the number in the newspaper ad and asked.

"Hi, I was just calling to follow up about the painting job. Also, shall I return the videotape to you?"

"Oh, don't worry about the videotape, I will call you back."

Never heard from him again. Drove by that office a few times over the years, and the building changed hands and then got torn down at some point and condos put up instead.

Clearly I had done or said something wrong. For awhile I thought that maybe the videotape had been some kind of test, because I never returned it. Were they testing me to see if I stole, or something?

Oh god, and then years later I see the photo of Charles Buell Anderson on the internet. He died in 2005, apparently not having resurrected beforehand. New Jesus died in his chair while watching television.

Did a lot of reading about the Endeavor cult. I found a photo of the cultists on the internet, one guy looks like the guy who interviewed me and invited me to dinner, but without a name in the picture. The Endeavor people all wear white shirts. Charles/Jesus reportedly screamed and hit his followers and reached down the shirts of the females. They were supposed to recognize him as God, and without this recognition he said they were lacking in their ability to see.

Charles Buell Anderson was a real estate broker in Chicago, a recovered alcoholic who attended AA meetings. Indeed, his church still offers a space for local AA meetings today. I guess I wasn't that far off with the similarity to my grandparents, as my grandfather in Chicago was in sales too. My grandparents were into theosophy, faith healings, psychic stuff, the Christian Science Monitor, trendy spiritual things. Like this cult does.

The Endeavor School offers classes in art, theatre and music. At one point they tried to start up business giving talks at religious conventions along with performing a theatrical play and live music, all to recruit or ask for donations. I am guessing they took a look at me and thought religious person combined with art and theatre. Maybe Charles expected or hoped a former nun would recognize him as Jesus and I disappointed.

People sell everything they have for Endeavor. They leave their families to live with and be in this cult. I read online that they donate their furniture directly to the cult when they join, which would explain the "job" in the paper, and the building where it was all stored. I think this guy with the office was preparing to sell the furniture and then join the cult too. The whole scam was the reason they didn't reveal anything, and why I probably didn't get called back to work on selling the furniture.

I am definitely not amenable to cults or ecstatic religious groups. I was thoroughly worked over in such a way by the nuns, I cannot undo it even if I want to at this point. Whatever Charles is or was certainly went past me in a fog. They all wanted to talk religion and I just didn't oblige enough, or I didn't show the sort of enthusiasm that could withstand the scrutiny once I figured out what they were up to. Or I just blew it, the best opportunity ever!

If you are in the Endeavor church, or any group that asks you to donate your finances and leave your family, call someone, anyone, to pick you up. Let me offer some hope. You can start over no matter what you have done for that religion. I had to give my furniture back to the nuns when I left, and I slept on the floor for a long time. Eventually you can afford better tea.

Burial Plans

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 12:10:00 +0000

By coincidence we are on the last day of 2022, but I have to get real. Plans have to be made for disposal of the tea collection. For a few years now I’ve been comforted by the plan I had of a tea vendor to pick up my tea etc in the event of my demise. Offer my son a few dollars, he will be glad to be rid of it all in one UHaul.

But this is all starting to feel a bit personal hygiene. Nobody is going to want my lovingly tea stained puerh ware. Let’s face it, because that’s what it is. It’s akin to one’s underwear. Anyone who hoards, and I’m not saying that’s me, or you, but the fact is we don’t want anyone messing about in our tea…stuff. The idea of it is completely repellant.

We all know the realistic advice is always to drink it down while you can, but really we are tea obese here. Drinking down is not possible, and for a sensible variety of reasons including, but not limited to: year of tea, current aging cycle, remediation of various storage conditions, the weather and one’s current physical capacity to consume different stages of the aging cycle. This is just the start. A person like this is as incapable as the relatives will be, the ones who come over to throw it all out. We either are or know someone deserving of support for the active stages of de-collecting.

Our friend blogger Wilson Lim wrote in his summary of tea world chatter Back to the Future, “ 2. The profile of Chinese tea buyers in China - There are less younger tea drinkers. The younger generation prefer to drink coffee at fancy establishment like Starbucks or prefer to drink bubble tea instead.”

Well, fk ‘em those young ones. Some of those lucky ones could have inherited granddaddy and grandmaw’s tea, but guess what, the only way is to bury it with you. The sole completely hygienic way for the tea, and the specially stained tea ware, to go is in the grave with the rest of your ashes.

So this is the burial option. I’d be fine really if my son dug a hole in the yard and saved the expense. Unless he can really sell it or get anything for it. The shovel is the cheapest option, and then I can leave behind a pile of ceramics in the dirt for the future generations to dig up and wonder about.

Pure Air Sanitorium, Bayfield

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 10:34:00 +0000

The back facade windows all faced Lake Superior.

One of the projects I always intended to get to in my life is doing something with a set of photos I took in high school. For more than 50 years, I have hauled around a set of film negatives that I took of Pure Air Sanitorium in Bayfield, Wisconsin. The building no longer exists, the moldering remains finally demolished in the early 1990s. I felt moved to get these photos posted after seeing only one or two photos online, even the one posted by the Wisconsin Historical Society is small and barely representative of the atmosphere of the building.

This sanitorium was built in 1922 to house mainly Ojibwe Indians with tuberculosis, but was quickly expanded with an additional wing in 1923 to house war veterans with TB or other rehab issues. The building continued to house TB patients until it was closed in 1975. I first saw the building in 1976 or so.

Bayfield sits on the shores of Lake Superior, with a ferry to Madeline Island, and the surrounding area populated by two Indian reservations. Mainly the small towns surrounding Lake Superior are tourist attractions and boating for people from Minneapolis/St. Paul. The Bad River Tribe keeps the wild rice beds around the Ashland area.

My father purchased a boat about a half mile down the railroad tracks at Port Superior, a full service marina, with the intention of deep sea fishing on the lake. We spent some months there every year for nearly 20 years. My brother earned his captain's license which served him well, he recently did a decade-long stint on the Atlantic as a private deep sea fishing captain. My brother has a sixth sense for fish.

Port Superior in the distance.
Below, what’s left of the sewage plant
after the demolition of the sanitorium.

While he was busy fishing with my father, I had time to run around with my step-sister and we both had boyfriends in the area, sort of. One of things we loved to do was walk up the railroad tracks to visit Pure Air Sanitorium, which was for sale for a number of years. The windows were often open to keep the building aired out, because the lakeside location meant the air was always damp.

We were very much at that teen age where one is fascinated by creepy things like ghosts, vampires and haunted houses, and we were convinced the old San was absolutely haunted. Once inside an open window, we crept through the dark hallways and any old noise inside the building made us run away screaming.

After getting into the basement windows, we noted the kitchen area in the basement was completely covered in green mold inches thick. We saw an ancient box of donuts that must have been purchased on the final work day. One donut no longer had any original organic matter left to it, it was entirely a donut-shaped ring of green mold.

The X-ray room.

The next two floors up were bedrooms. During the active years, patients at the sanitorium were almost entirely confined to their rooms. The building had no dining room, because meals were taken on trays to the bedrooms.

Patients were taken from their rooms to "air" outdoors, even in cold winter weather. In the early days of tuberculosis treatment, the population of people at the sanitorium either died in two years or less, or they got better and able to go home. Most met one of those two fates within 6 months of arriving. Very rarely were people there longer than two years.

The San had a dentist office.
Not sure what this was.

In the late 1940s, the first antibiotic was developed that worked on some tuberculosis cases. Then a second antibiotic was added, which helped a few more cases. Finally in the late 1950s, a three-antibiotic regime was developed that became the standard today. The care of patients changed dramatically after that. People got cured to be sure, but also some people developed resistances to the antibiotics.

The shortest course of treatment was still about six months, but now some patients lingered much longer. I found one testimonial online by a person who said her mother was in Pure Air for nearly 13 years, having a highly resistant case. I tried to find out if people were kept housed at Pure Air for other reasons, like mental illness, other behavioral problems or rehabilitation issues, or even racial issues, but I could not find any evidence of this.

The room that had a pool table at one point.
Behind the curtains is a blocked window.

On the second floor, at opposite ends of the building were two larger group rooms. One was used as an occupational therapy room. I saw party supplies left from the last days the place was open, and Bingo tokens scattered. The opposite room was more of a recreational room and had a pool table which we messed around with, though most of the balls were missing. I tried to figure out what the little curtained "puppet stage" was used for. Behind the curtain was a window that opened. I think the little stage was used for church services, and the window was used to observe the patients and pass medicine or treats through without the staff coming into much contact with the patients in the room. This was probably the one area people met with their family, apart from their bedroom.

The lab.

The building also had a locked laboratory, except that the window was open in the lab which made it easy for us to sort of sneak in there. I took some photos of the sputum slides which were used to determine if a patient was responding to treatment and ready to leave.

Because the building was so creepy, we didn't dare remove or touch anything apart from the pool table. We mostly sat around smoking cigarettes or pot. One regret I have is the tiny room with a medallion window, which was reached by a metal ladder and ran alongside the elevator shaft.

Medallion window.

Behind this window in a crawl space we found a cardboard box filled with mimeographed newsletters that were produced within the building for the patients. They contained things like messages and greetings between patients who were confined to their rooms. The messages lined up with old postcards we found in some of the bedrooms with messages like "Merry Christmas to you from Mary in room 209." I left the newsletters, but always regretted that I didn't simply remove them. What a treasure they would be now for the historical society.

More stuff in the lab.

Another curious space was a junk pile outdoors in the woods just off the grounds. We found all kinds of things ranging from glass syringes to old bottles, tins and even religious items. Again nothing really that we wanted to have or keep, but just adding to the creepiness.

One of the staff houses.

Also the grounds had two brick residences, one for nurses and another for doctors, used as offices and sleeping quarters for overnight. These also had a kitchen and living space, so the professional staff maintained themselves away from the contagious patients. We wandered through these as well, but they really contained nothing much.

The drive-way view.

I visited the property year after year. The grounds had a sewage treatment system with operating sewage ponds, which served other properties in the area and has since been updated. This treatment system was of interest to my family as it served the Port Superior complex. So my father followed the fate of the sanitorium. He heard that an offer was made on the building by a local "cult," of sorts. One of the doctors in Washburn who stitched up my face after a fall belonged to the cult, it was said. The offer on the building was declined. With the mold and crumbling plaster walls, the entire place was not livable. It would have needed a full gut job down to the bricks.

Creepy ivy covered door.
Probably held grounds-keeping
equipment

The building finally got torn down in the early 1990s, I think. I visited it shortly before it was torn down. By then nearly all of the windows were broken. I took my photos in 1980 or 1981 before all that vandalism. With all the years we spent in the area, almost nowhere else is as familiar to my memory as the lake shore here, the forests, the damp. I still know when the smelt is running, and when the maple sap season begins. I am glad to know that the Ojibwe have reclaimed some of Madeline Island, which was once a place of governance by the tribes. I know how it feels to be there, I would love to see it all again, but the touristy nature of the entire area means you need reservations years in advance to even stay, and it's not cheap.

If you want more information, you might find something at the Bayfield Heritage Association. I know they used to do live exhibits for the school children on the Sanitorium, but I am not sure if they still do those presentations. But they may have more photos or records.

The window is just left open, oh if I could go back.

Edit, 25 Feb. 2025: I have donated the above photos and my negatives to the Bayfield Heritage Association, when they approached me to borrow them for a historical presentation on the San. The copyright for these photos now properly belongs to the Bayfield Heritage Association. Please contact them if you wish to use the photos. You can enjoy their presentation on YouTube.

2022 CSH Jiang Xin Sample Box

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 03:24:00 +0000

I just cannot say no to free tea. Nobody teaches a puerh tea lover this skill, and whatever about tea drinking is supposed to teach moderation, well this lesson has thus far escaped me. Really I am not planning to continue tea reviewing, but when CSH messaged me on Instagram asking if I want their new sample box, what I managed to type was "thank you for thinking of me." And left it at that. Next I got an email with a shipping number.

CSH offered this sample box free to 500 people back in September. After reaching 500, the sample box was to sell another few hundred at around $5 and then increase to $9.99. Right now I see the price for it is marked down to $4.99 with the regular price at $35. But you can still get it for free if you are a new customer to Chen Sheng Hao by signing up for the newsletter. Got all that?

The sample box is cute and comes with a complimentary cotton shopping bag, which can double as tea storage if you are running out of room on the sofa. The tea arrived in mid-October for me after the harvest shipping vacation passed. You get two puerh samples, raw and cooked, along with samples of black (red) tea.

First I tried the black (red) which is 1-2g of tea in a pyramid style tea bag. They really need to up this by a gram, I did not feel I got much strength out of this to consider buying 100 tea bags for $100. The tea has the malty chocolate profile typical of Feng Qing area teas. If you need tea for the office where you cannot properly gongfu loose tea, this might be an option. But in purely terroir terms, Yunnan Sourcing offers the same origin tea for a fraction of the cost. It's just okay.

The sample box contains yet another pyramid tea bag of raw puerh. I passed on this, the leaves looked rather finely chopped which may be fine for a tea bag. But I just cannot bring myself to try this. If anyone has done, feel free to drop a comment on it. Maybe I passed on something good, I don't know, but I binned it.

Moving on, the star of the sample box is the 2022 Jiang Xin raw (kinda passing by the shou sample). I was not in the mood to like this after passing up the tea bag, but the tea is a decent one. The leaves are very green and this tea might be too much on the stomach for some. I didn't bother weighing the chunk and probably should have, but I assumed this would be a one and dump at first.

The tea is listed as Bulang large leaf, but also as "mixed," or blended material. The blend may contain other years as my soup had something of an orange tone. The blend is obvious immediately with the first few brews, the hay-like Bulang large leaves mixed with what tasted and smelled like a more floral northern tea. The brew has a touch of smokiness, evidenced by the little pieces of blackened leaves (char) in the strainer, but it's just right and not too much.

For those of you new to factory puerh, this tea is one of many series "editions," and should properly be understood as an edition. This means the factory has created a series that is likely to remain fairly consistent in the blend from year to year. Factories create many of these blends, and even more in the past 5 years. The "recipes" don't have numbers in the way the state factories had decades ago, like the 7542. This Jiang Xin, translated as "craftsmanship" is thus the Craftsmanship edition recipe, and the series seems to be new in 2021, so we have two years available to purchase. The 2022 retails for $249 for a 357g beeng. This compares to the higher end 2022 Lao Ban Zhang at over $900 a beeng, and thus the Craftsmanship edition is among the budget offerings, although the Zodiac series in the $50-75 range is the least expensive CSH tea.

In the first 3 brews, the blend is very obvious. I can easily pick out the floral leaves. But the Bulang large leaves overpower the brew quickly. This tea is a bitter goalie kick to the face, especially as the tea cools, and I'm here for it. Reading the tea description, the tea is to have decent huigan (returning sweetness) and the tea made a real effort in my mouth. The bitterness is fully mouth coating and long lasting, pulling hard at my taste buds in the back of my mouth, but didn't quite convert. My cup had a lingering floral aroma that dispelled after three brews.

As I said, I was not prepared to like this tea, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. The tea lacks any of the subtlety of the more pricey Naka and LBZ teas. But it is a powerful tea nevertheless. I got a nice buzz in my face which might be the blood rush to my mouth to cope with the intense bitterness. Oh hell yeah. This is the type of tea I crave in early summer, a bitter strong punch of puerh.

This tea illustrates why puerh tea is the king of green teas. It's why Chinese tea, Yunnan puerh in particular, is one of the world's most powerful natural things you can consume. I think of malt whiskey or chili peppers as comparisons in terms of strength. This tea makes coffee taste like brown water, and regular green tea taste like weak Kool Aid. Teas like this are why tea drinkers so often settle on puerh as their tea of choice. Really no tea compares with raw puerh, once you get into it.

I forgot to take a photo of the brew.
It was orange/yellow, as usual.

Looking at aging potential, we have the strong grade 8-ish Bulang leaves, and the blended leaves. Will the blended leaves age out or get overwhelmed over time by the Bulang tea, which really requires some heat and humidity to age. The difficulty with all these factory edition teas is figuring out which of them will turn into anything decent after 20 years, assuming the tea is well-cared for. And whether shelling out $249 for a decently bitter tea, albeit a blend, is a wise purchase or whether one should should go cheaper if bitterness is really all you want.

I think if you live in a hot and humid climate which can really care for this tea, it's worthwhile to pick it up, maybe the 2021 since this 2022 year is considered a wetter year. The caveat here is we don't know what the blend is, and there may be some older tea blended in.

Here is what I suggest. Pick up the sample box for $4.99. Get a taste of this now. If you are in puerh for the long haul, put the Jiang Xin series on your mental list and look out for it in 10 years. A well-stored version in the reseller market from places like Taiwan or Malaysia won't cost less, but decent storage on this tea even at $400 a beeng might be an excellent quarter-beeng split situation with friends.

CSH seems to be paying close attention to tea chatter in the west. I think they are well aware that the market for the higher end is just not here in the west, and they are trying to promote the more budget side of their offerings. I continue to wish them success because we are fortunate they are marketing directly to us, offering loyalty points and sample boxes. Factory direct doesn't get more accessible than this.

Brewing Blind

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 05:26:00 +0000

The end of the line on this blog is closer now. I am not quite there yet, but I can see the end of Old Cwyn and her tea insanity. Nature, and probably poor nuture combined, are having their way with me slowly but surely. While I have no immediate plans to end our tea writing, we are getting to where plans must be made going forward. At the beginning of this blog, in the very first entry, I wrote that I planned to drink tea to my death, and I will do everything I can to accomplish this goal. But days are coming where I know I will be stuck and need to ease myself into sliding out of writing.

My health condition is stable, currently. However, I received a diagnosis of macular degeneration about a year ago. I mentioned this in the Prioress letter earlier this year on the blog, but I did not really explain much. I got this eye diagnosis a year ago, and I was told back then I have 5 years or so of eyesight, now it will be 4 years. There is no treatment other than to hope for the best.

I have noticed my central vision blurring for a few years already, especially during night driving. I also noticed I could no longer read lines on the television. Last year I managed to finish a video game 100% without being able to read any of the text on screen. Now I have a much larger TV and can read a bit again, but with my IPad I sometimes need to use the magnifying glass. It’s annoying because my main activity of enjoyment, along with tea, is reading. I stopped driving a car at night, and mostly I let others drive now even during the day.

Anyway, I have had one year to notice a bit more deterioration and grow accustomed to the idea of losing more of my sight. To be completely honest, I was told back in my 20s by my childhood optometrist that I would probably lose my sight in old age. I guess I had some markers he recognized. For most people who need glasses, eyesight tends to stabilize in a person’s 20s and 30s and mine never did. I needed a new prescription every year or so. Which is why I didn’t think anything untoward over my blurry vision these past few years, because in my life I always needed new glasses at any given time. But here we are.

After the bad news, the first thing I thought of was naturally my tea, because I probably love my tea more than my son and cats combined. Well, at least part of me does, the part I named Old Cwyn and gave this obsessively selfish pig voice so she could get it out.

I read someplace that when bad things happen in England, the “power grid people” can see the electricity spike as folks around the country simultaneously fire up electric tea kettles. I relate to that most endearing trait. So, of course of all the things to worry about, puerh is up there at #1 or damn close. I can get in an aide to help me shower, but who is out there to hire to check my puerh collection?

This is a real worry.. We have mold to watch for, insects and god only knows what else that can happen in puerh storage. Fortunately, my tea is lidded in crocks and various other places. Containers. Tea cups and tea pots. Okay a few other places and some is sitting out. Well, it is still a bit summer here, so I have things on the porch for the heat. Yeah, some fu bricks out there also. Dear god. I am mostly adept at smelling any problems in the tea, but soon enough I could be drinking small insects and not know it.

Even worse is the issue of how to brew tea if I am blind, or mostly blind. I cannot possibly rely on anybody else to know how to brew a puerh tea. Would you? Would your spouse even know how to brew your puerhs, much less find the one you want to drink when you ask them to look? I suppose one could write English on the wrappers, but I hesitate to add inks to my wrappers, that seems dodgy although I know people do it. I worry about ink and how it might bleed into the tea. Even if I label things so I can get somebody to find the tea I want, the issue of how to brew puerh is not something that just any fool can do.

There is a huge difference between someone who is blind from birth, or childhood, and someone who develops blindness later in life, in terms of getting around problems of how to do things. My eyesight has been lousy most of my life, so I got accustomed early on to functioning in my living space at night without lights on. I keep things in the same places for years on end so I can find stuff in the dark. But brewing puerh tea is another matter: we are dealing with boiling hot water, gongfu tea/water ratios, bitty teapots and tiny cups. I can use a mug instead of a cup. Some of you might say “just grandpa that shit” but no way. Shou okay, but I would rather give away all my sheng than spend my days drinking grandpa sheng. Forget that.

I thought that after a year of hearing this news I would figure out what to do about my tea, and about brewing blind, but I really don’t have any answers yet. Denial works for me most days, but I need to keep thinking ahead even if I don’t want to. I did some preliminary research into some possible brewing options. For example, here is a Braille infuser photo I found online.

Then we have Braille objects like this one.

My thoughts on these items were that I could buy them early, get accustomed to using them and I would be all set. I even found some potential amusements already.

But I have two problems here. One, none of these products in these photos are for purchase. They are prototypes available for sale and manufacture. To order something like this, you need to place an order for a minimum number of units. Think about how many units of tea kettles, brewing devices and such that a vendor purchases wholesale to sell. I cannot think of any tea vendor who has more than a handful of any brewing item to sell to anyone. A place like Walmart orders hundreds of electric kettles, but how many Braille items are needed in the general marketplace? Surely people need these devices, but the population of customers is so small that I don’t think Walmart would even consider the volume sufficient to order a Braille mug to sell.

Another problem, I don’t know Braille. My friend DW decided to help me on that, and he called up our friend Marty for me, a teacher recently retired from the Wisconsin School for the Blind.

“Marty says it’s not that easy,” DW phoned me back. “He said adults mostly are unable to learn Braille if you didn’t learn it when you were a kid.”

I know Braille books are out of the question anyway. Most libraries stock popular trash that even the large print collection has nothing I would want to read. Braille library books are probably worn down to the point that only a very skilled person could decipher the dots. Braille teapots just don’t seem practical for someone like me, even if I found one to buy and bought it early to learn the buttons while I can still see.

You know what would be so perfect? That damned Teforia tea machine that crapped out on me.

The Teaforia had an app I ran on my IPad. I could voice-command that app to brew my shit. The Teforia had a double-walled brewing globe and double-walled carafe, no risk of burning myself on the water, nor the tea, and I had a mug that held all the tea from the carafe. I could easily fill the water basket at the sink and replace it onto the machine without needing any eyesight whatsoever. But then, the stupid sensor for the globe stopped sensing it was locked on. Even though the machine worked perfectly well I could no longer get it to start up with the sensor error because the stupid “smart” device lacked a basic ON button.

Supposedly a new Teforia is in the works, but every time I check on when it will be released the date gets pushed back another six months. Probably supply chain issues and no financing. I have given up on it ever being released.

So here I am. After a full year mulling on these issues, I have no answers whatsoever as to how I will care for my puerh teas, and how I will choose one to brew except at random, and how I will brew them properly without burning myself. I have zero ideas and nobody to help me and I know I am too fussy about tea to ever accept that anybody can brew puerh to my perfect taste. Even I don’t always brew well. You know how it is, at any given time puerh tea goes through changes and whatever worked last time to brew the tea now needs brewing around.

I have a few non-tea-related posts of things I want to put up on this blog. They are mostly some old photos and a few Wisconsin historical things I fell into that I want to post someplace. I don’t have anywhere else suitable for them on the web to post, it’s not worth starting another blog for non-tea-related stuff. I apologize ahead for the non-tea content that may not interest anyone. But the end is not here yet, and I still have plenty more to write about concerning tea. The puerh tea scene certainly remains sufficiently insane to provide a never-ending trove of silly trips and tripes to get me started.

Before the Fall

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Fri, 30 Sep 2022 09:05:00 +0000

The last day of September is here already, and in my part of the world autumn is arriving. We went from turning off the air conditioning earlier this week and turning on the heating the following day. No lazy days with the windows hanging open this year. I am more tired nowadays, getting hard to find the energy to sit down and write as the basics of daily living take more effort at my age. I have so many unfinished drafts. But I can appreciate the start of cooler days more as I slow down, especially the turnover of teas I reach for. Over the warm summer, greens and shengs clutter up my countertop. Between those I reached for coffee sometimes, and many days it was just too hot to drink any hot beverage. Instead I had a lot more water, sparkling water and diet cola.

This summer I planned to brew up iced teas, but I gave up after a few tries. I have to admit once and for all I just do not like iced tea. I don't mind slurping up the remains a cold cup of a tea that starts out hot, but a finishing swig is not the same as a full tall glass of iced tea. I tried a big bottle of that unsweetened iced tea you can find at the grocery store, you know the one, it has a green label and green top on the bottle. It was so terrible I tossed half of it out. Mainly I wanted the container, thinking I would refill it with cold tea, and I still have the bottle. And I made an effort with my new Stanley French Press, doing some grandpa green sheng teas with it and pouring them over ice. Then the weather got too hot and with no A/C in my bedroom, I started out my day too warm to bother brewing hot tea and waiting for it for cool off, and ended the day still trying to cool off.

So, with some relief I set aside my iced tea efforts now and turn to my darker teas. I need to get the Fu bricks off the porch. This week I pulled out my 2018 Arbor Red from white2tea, the last cake I have. After a year or more drinking Fu brick, I have not yet dipped back into my hongcha with any determination, and I have forgotten how good Arbor Red is. The tea is ridiculous in how long it brews. With 4g of tea, I can brew two steepings a day poured into a mug and the leaves are still just opening up 5 days later. I am not a fan of the sweet and malty Yunnan gold style hongcha teas. I prefer something more astringent and savory that packs a punch of caffeine.

Arbor Red leaves after 5 days

Arbor Red for me fits with my night owl self, it's a hefty snifter of tea energy. I don't wake up in the morning feeling perky like many people do. I feel like a sack of shit. I forced myself up in the morning back in the convent days, but ended up in the bathroom so many times just feeling nauseous for no reason other than the hour of the day seemed unholy to me. As a kid I used to think about all the executions at dawn in WW1, like Edith Cavell, that's the level of dark morning is for me. In the summer, early mornings are not so bad and I enjoy them more. But fall and winter, my body nopes out. I am the perfect night shift person, and took as many late shift and weekend shifts as I could in my clinical days. By 10:00 pm I feel stellar. Give me a heavy caffeinated beverage and I can rock out the night getting so much done. I thought I might turn around in old age, but instead I am just more of what I always was. My family hates it.

As hongcha teas go, Arbor Red is not a light floral tea, I like it for the robust astringency like chewing grape skins. It's an easy transition if you like English-style assams. If budget is a serious issue, I'd recommend looking at Yunnan Sourcing's Feng Qing hongs, or their purple leaf blacks. But Arbor Red is a better value than it seems with the initial outlay, simply because of the longevity of the leaves. I can get 5-6 days out of 4g of tea, with doing two steepings. So for me, a 200g disk lasts nearly 200 days. That brings my cost down to more like 25 cents a steeping.

Day 6 on the same leaves, hardly see the bottom yet.

I really loved beautiful hong teas from places like Joseph Wesley (whatever happened to that vendor??), but the cost for those teas was around $10 or $20 for a small amount of tea that lasted maybe a few weeks at best. So while $85-95 initial cost for Arbor Red seems steep, it's a better value for the longevity than some of the gourmet red teas I have enjoyed in the past.

So I re-upped on Arbor Red yesterday, and the mail can take 3 months if it does and I'm good for awhile. I need to dig out what I have left of aged Shui Xian pillows and the roasted oolongs I have been hoarding for years. Not to mention checking out the more aged puerh teas I own. I won't think about winter until it hits, but at least I have teas to look forward to trying again.

2022 10th Anniversary and Liu Bao white2tea

noreply@blogger.com (Cwyn) — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 07:51:00 +0000

No, I have not forgotten my blog. Still here with at least four blog posts in my head and a couple in actual draft. Here I have a few notes on teas held up because I just cannot find time lately to sit down for a decent tea session without any interruption. Mostly I am caffeine-on-the-go over the past month, grabbing a mug of something and trying to remember to drink it before it goes cold. Then I sit down and already the sun is gone for the day, and I am overtired, overheated and ready for bed. These are the usual excuses of a life that needs to slow down and get easier because I'm so ready for the shit to stop.

This month I wanted to write about these two teas from white2tea's 2022 lineup. As usual for me these past few years, I try and buy a couple things from their new teas to support the shop and see what TwoDog is up to. I planned to buy the 10th Anniversary tea because I own the 5 year Anniversary beeng. TwoDog suggested the 2022 Liu Bao when I said I wanted something fresh to try.

Mostly when you see Liu Bao for sale, the tea is aged already or has a head start either with pile fermentation or oxidized as pressed bricks. I really wanted the opportunity to try Liu Bao fresh, and un-pressed, so I can gauge its transformation over time. The leaf quality here is pristine. Most aged Liu Bao teas are broken leaves and dusty bits, so for me buying a fresh tea like this is worth the money. Liu Bao ages fairly quickly compared to puerh tea, and with proper humidity maintains itself for many years. But unlike factory Liu Bao, this tea has not undergone any pile aging or oxidation.

I drank this tea for over a week straight as my a.m. caffeine shot. It's not harsh like puerh, so I was fine with it on an empty stomach. The leaves are long which limits the amount I can pile into a brewing vessel. I used a gravity steeper and did 3 steepings per day, which means I got two mornings of tea out of each dose. The tea is reliable for a good six money steeps, which is fairly typical for Liu Bao.

This tea does not resemble puerh so much as a very fine green tea. It is lightly floral with a mild honey note, and very grassy which most green teas are. I find the sample well worth it for the experience of drinking Liu Bao fresh as I have wanted to for some time. I spent many years trying various incarnations of green tea processing and can finally add this to my experiences. If I were looking to age Liu Bao for myself, this is definitely the choice by far, although one advantage of factory Liu Bao is the handy storage basket which you can get from white2tea only if you buy a full 250g order. I'd much rather have this than broken dusty bits that most factory Liu Bao teas are.

2022 10th Anniversary Beeng

I planned to buy this tea as my purchase for 2022, because I own the older anniversary beeng. I bought a full beeng plus a 25g sample too. Lately I have been doing this with teas I want to keep intact in the wrapper. I probably won't open the beeng any time soon, the point is to store it in Wisconsin and someday see how the tea does, he can have it back to compare with his storage in China. Hence the sample size to keep track of the tea without opening the beeng. I did the same with 72 Hours, tried the sample I had instead of opening the tea. As you all know, a loose beeng sheds tea in storage every time you shift things around.

This tea will only remain on offer for 2022, and then it will return to white2tea's storage. The older 5th Anniversary tea is now back on the catalog, but it is much more expensive, almost twice the price it once was. I have not opened the older tea, so I cannot compare it currently, but the two teas are not comparable. The 10th Anniversary tea contains a number of teas from 2017-2020, so not the same tea at all in the 5th Anniversary. I can imagine these anniversary teas are a memory lane trip for TwoDog of the teas he acquired during the intervening years.

I brewed 6 grams of this tea in a porcelain gaiwan which started out as 7 grams and then I accidentally got a bit of wet cat food flung onto my tea. So I picked out about a gram to get rid of the cat food bit.

The tea has the house floral-northern aroma many teas from white2tea have, and then a more pungent tomato vine note underneath. I did a very quick rinse of mostly clear liquid. The first steeping after that came out orange-yellow and then lightened up to a deep yellow on subsequent steepings.

Hit with boiling water, the tea starts out very floral on the top note with a pungent, warm spicy core. I can definitely taste the different batches of tea in here. This tea is newly steamed and pressed after stored in bags for a few years. The orange color shows the oxidation on some of the older leaves in the mix.

Subsequent steeps continue this dual note of floral fruity with a spicy base that is cooling on the throat and warm in the tummy. The blend is a good way to try a tea that has such a clear distinction between the notes. It's a strong tea, not a subtle creeper. Let the tea cool down to about 90-95C and it gets very bitter. So I feel the tea has something at the core that is maybe more 'banna-ish that will give substance after aging if the floral top notes fade.

I noticed after steep 5 I needed to brew the tea longer than flash steeps. The tea leaves opened up quickly due to their recent steaming. I did three more brews going about a minute or so in the gaiwan. The tea still had a bit more, but the main notes now are the deeper spicy pepper ones and less of the floral/fruit. I feel like a good 10 steepings are reasonable to expect from the tea once a few years go by and the pressing sticks together more. Right now the pressing is just so recent the tea is giving more early on than it will down the road.

The leaf examination yields some very firm leaves, a few buds but many larger leaves. I don't see any processing issues like reddened edges or char. The tea does not have off-odors at all.

It's a good example of what white2tea offers all in one beeng with the contrast of teas. I'm not sure how this will gel together, but it will be interesting to see if it all melds in a different way over time, because right now the teas used in this blend are quite distinct. That makes it useful if you are hoping to learn more about detecting different notes in puerh teas, because the contrast is so obvious. At $98 for the 200g beeng I think it's a great choice if you are looking for a decent white2tea that is still coming in under $100.