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I don't tend to notice sour range so often in black tea, but I did just write review notes for a version from Vietnam that seemed sour to me. I've long since had trouble separating out if a processing input caused related experience in the past, or if it couldn't be from atypical material being used...

Even in person it's difficult to see that it looks different related to the leaf texture definitely being wet and pliable (before I dried it out). There are cake and separated leaf images in this post: http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.com/2022/07/doi-ngam-thai-wild-origin-sheng.html I've tried f...

This process and steps like testing humidity or thinking to check moisture removal would be more familiar if I was regularly conditioning cakes, the process would be familiar and I'd have related equipment handy. I don't, because if they're a little dry I store them in natural local humid conditions...

I didn't weigh the salt or the cakes; that would've made sense. there could easily be a range of different answers about how producers dry cakes after pressing them, and then how they did it. processes probably depend on scale and type of processing equipment involved. I'll never really know if all ...

This is definitely an unusual context, since I first tried sheng and shu a decade ago, and bought cakes of both back then, and never encountered it before. I recently tried a Thai wild origin cake version that seemed too damp to me, not dried properly. It was a very newly produced version, almost ce...

...Back to the topic, $100 is a stretch for puerh. Tea houses may be a good place to sample puerh but my experience has been that tea houses will try to sell you products unless you know what you want. I would start with shu, good storage, maybe a xiaguan, tulin factory, or a gongting/palace puerh....

Cwyn mentioned an interesting starting point in her last Death by Tea blog post, about someone losing a sheng collection in a flood, and how one might re-start owning sheng spending only $100. Then her suggestions really shifted to how a beginner might go about exploration, which isn't exactly the s...

that water subject is pretty complicated, and never really gets resolved in discussions. the general idea is that some mineral content helps a final extracted tea feel pleasant, and probably even helps with the extraction process. then particulars are hard to pin down. total dissolved solids is just...

about pots, this must be talking about porous clay pots used for brewing tea. until you learn and experience a little about a range of tea types it might be as well to set that whole subject aside. I don't really get where the shu advice is coming from, except in relation to not exploring shu very m...

It must be difficult to interpret how humidity level affects sheng pu'er storage outcomes, without anything but a graph of the humidity level and temperature inside the storage environment, or I guess maybe even then. I just went through reviewing some sheng from Kunming that was supposedly stored i...

It's interesting having kids at this time and addressing the "people are idiots" subject. It comes up on its own; like that four years that Trump was the president, or pandemic denial. It doesn't really link back to tea so much though. They don't care about the subject and I don't force it on them. ...

+1 mostly; however, Whether it is a matter of ego or comfort, one may want to stop thinking of themselves a novice tea afficionado. Nonetheless, I admire how you keep the experience fresh. This point is especially interesting; how or when would it help to think that you are towards the middle of th...

I think keeping a beginner's mind perspective is important, which contradicts the question form just a little. I'm still my novice self, even though I've been at it awhile, and have covered some ground. The journey is the thing, so trying to make that exploration as efficient as possible won't reall...

I would expect that the effect should show up in standard ways common to conventional flavored teas, and I'm not noticing that in versions I've tried, which span a broad range. In those added flavors typically wash out pretty fast, as when drinking Earl Grey. Not always though, so I suppose done in ...

A couple of weeks later I went to a Chinese section of Bangkok w/ someone who knows much > I do about tea & seems to like to everything. He will say a tea is only fair at best while drinking it w/ pleasure. At our third stop & around our tenth tea sampled, he said that one tea was very good, not th...