Collect tea experiences, not just tea

 

2022 Zhengjian Tie Guan Yin from Anxi

There are two kinds of tea lovers: the tea drinkers and the tea collectors. If you enjoy mostly fresh teas like spring green teas, high mountain Oolongs or fragrant Wenshan Baozhongs, then you're most likely to purchase your tea strictly according to your consumption and reorder when your inventory is almost depleted. If you're into puerh and/or roasted Oolongs, then there are good chances that you purchase some of your teas as a collector rather than a consumer. The goal of the collector becomes to own and age rather than drink the tea. 

Indeed, these two types of tea are very well suited for this purpose, because they have good potential to improve with time if they were carefully selected and stored. If you live in a dry climate, roasted Oolongs make most sense, while puerh benefits from warm and humid climates (like southern China/Taiwan/Malaysia). From a tea seller perspective, there can be lots of reasons for people to purchase lots of tea. I'm glad if they do! However, from a tea student point of view (and we are all students!) the goal isn't to collect tea without drinking it! 

Let's say it this way, if you own a tong or a ton of tea and simply keep it in storage, it's as if you don't have this tea! It's like having gold hidden in the attic and never using it. This tong of puerh that you're afraid to break may be nice to show off, but buying and, maybe, selling it one day will only bring you the price difference. You miss the learning opportunity of a tea experience. If you keep on postponing brewing the tea, you have no idea how it tastes now, how it's evolving!

2022 Spring Zhengjian Tie Guan Yin

My advice is quite simple. Tea is meant to be drunk. If you're collecting tea in larger quantities, then avoiding mistakes is even more important than if you simply purchase a pack of 25 gr or 150 gr. That's why you should ideally taste a sample before committing to a large quantity. And you should regularly taste the tea in your storage in order to monitor how it's evolving. Collecting these experiences will improve your tea knowledge and help you make better informed purchasing decisions in the future.

Luckily for us, it's far simpler to flake some tea from a cake or to brew a few grams of Oolong from a jar than opening a bottle of wine! 

With the cooler seasons upon us, now is a good time to revisit the teas we're storing! And if you're inventory is low and wish to purchase high quality teas, check our bargains here, the puerhs here and the roasted Oolongs there. I'm fortunate to live in Taiwan and  take great care in selecting all my leaves. By the way, Joël in Switzerland said that this tea pictured in this post is the best Tie Guan Yin he has tasted so far!