He's back!

After a kind of severe cold, my friend Michael suffered from aversion to tea for several months. During that time, due to illness, finances, and the aversion, he wound up either giving or selling almost all the tea he had.

Today he wrote me: "A good friend of mine who’s originally from Taiwan recently got married. As a wedding gift, I gave him the 40-year-old baozhong I got from you; I thought he’d appreciate it, and I was correct—he was ecstatic, and the next day he told me he thought the tea was excellent, and that he hoped that with age his marriage would grow and become as refined as the tea."

Maybe you would like to exchange some tea samples with him to celebrate his recovery?! I see he has some cooked puerh he'd like to exchange.

This gives me the opportunity to say words of praise for Mike Petro's initiative: creating a free "classifieds" section on his pu-erh.net website. Teaparker recommends tasting a sample before purchase. While this is common in Chinese tea shops, it is not always practical on the Net. (For my part, I always give free samples with even the smallest order, so that at least for the most expensive teas you can taste them before buying.)

An alternative method to get these samples is to exchange some of your teas with others. This is exactly what this service allows you to do. I also noticed that a friend of mine has a list of his inventory in a file and would send it to tea fans he meets on the Net to exchange teas. These are good ways to make friends and gain more knowledge and experience with teas from different sources.