‘beginners’ guide to puerh ‘tea world’

Yesterday I attended one tea tasting session in Vienna. It was held by William from Farmer’s Leaf.  BIG thank you William for your effort touring Europe back and forth and bringing first hand knowledge to tea fans. Any of you if you have such occasion then grab it and go for it. 

This post is no way critizing or in any other way disregarding people who start with tea, this is only my experience, I was the same, years ago, maybe could be only a helping stick to advance and enjoy tea more. 

We all with western type of thinking, probably already with ‘global’, science based knowledge, we like to think, we are learnt to think since we are born and learn to talk. Then we think that the thoughts are us and that the thoughts are the reality we live in, the world around us. 

Tea drinking is a taste, smell and body feeling experience. Then what it has to do with our thoughts? Our thoughts, our knowledge meets the tasting experience. Then so and so ‘data’, mostly given by others are tried to be fit with our experience BUT we all have our own matrix.

Why my tea experience should be the same? It never it is. Even drinking the same tea several time. Each moment, experience is different and tons of knowledge won’t help this experience be better. 

Putting more and more ‘data’ into the bag makes it more and more heavy and needs more effort to carry it further, to nourish it, to keep it tidy. 

Then where is the pure experience of tea? 

I still repeatedly experience the ‘broken connection’ of this pure experience. This comes in place when I daydream at the same time I drink tea, when I plan already other things while sipping my tea, when already thinking about the taste of the next cup while not finishing the one I have at my lips. 

It’s been some time I wrote this blog. The essence of it was to focus on the pure tea experience, not to be lured into the knowledge trap hole.

You heard a lot about puerh tea and you would like to try it. You would like to get the experience the others wrote about. So…

Buying your first cake
The first advice, please keep this in mind as you will end up with sheng and shu bings/cakes that you bought in a hope they will age into great teas. You will avoid them for years and thinking and waiting when they will turn into great teas. Remember bad puerh tea will never age into good puerh tea. Puerh tea has his value as cars has. Why someone would sell Mercedes for a price of Fiat? Noone would. The tricky thing is many times only reference of good sheng you have the price tag. You do not know if it is a Mercedes.

Good or bad sheng bing/cake?
The are big productions of sheng puerh cakes in China by famous factories and some cakes get a really high price tag. Such you may slightly say, yes, this is a good tea as there are reviews of it, some famous people says its good and so on… But we are in western world we do not have this big promoted sheng market. Thanks God we do not have. And again thanks God we still in this western world still sell samples of tea, even grams of it althought sometimes packing 2-3 grams of such and such tea I doubt if this is worth of doing. In China you want to try a sheng puerh cake you in most of the times has to buy a whole big until you go to a tea shop and the boss let you or rather makes you and drink with you that tea.

Buying a sample of expensive puerh teas
Refering to my shop, don’t have much experience with others, I suggest you to start with the cheapest teas in the offer. ‘Cheap’ does not have to mean bad in any way. My experience with tasting event is that the begginers even drinking the most expensive teas of my offer they tend to like more the ‘basic’ the cheapest ones or in case they are full of stories of Lao Banzhang then they end drinking these and pondering why is this tea so so expensive and why do people drink it even the high price?

Drinking samples and learning
Ok, let’s pretend we have a selection of samples sheng puerh teas. We all like to read and hear what others says about that and that tea. Here I suggest do not read the things I wrote about my teas, do not read what others wrote about them. Ofcourse you read the description when you buy them. Get them and then simply drink them and after you made your own judgement you may look up the description I wrote. In case you have a question drop me an email and I would be happy to discuss any of the teas. Do not worry if the tea won’t satisfy your expectations, drink another sample. Once you finished the samples from my shop you order from other shop. Then the more you drink the more skilled you will be and you will return to teas that will resonate in your mind, even without keeping any notes. Or you may not return you can even move to other tea kinds. Make the tea drinking a relaxing time and this is what tea is about.

to be continued….