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It's odd how infrequently I seem to have encountered flavored teas. A Lapsang Souchong version I bought once was clearly a chemical copy of smoke, but it couldn't come close to passing for the real thing. The Jin Xuan here in Thailand aren't marketed as milk oolong, and don't seem to ever include th...

I haven't experimented with making a tisane out of any fresh growing plant material, but papaya leaves and pine needles are exceptions. I went on an extended phase of trying papaya leaves prepared and dried in different ways, cut up or whole, dried slowly or quickly, roasted or not. The leaves are b...

Great reply @akedomakona

That's pretty much a detailed extension of what one ordinarily experiences, just going a bit further in terms of detail and explanation. It's interesting how acclimation plays into all that, preference shift, and what one tends to pick up.

I started on drinking tisanes, not "real teas," about 20 years before I did much with better tea. The hippie theme was a part of that. I was living in Vail, Colorado in the early 90s and got into teas and tisanes through products like Tazo teas, which mixed both. If better real tea had been around I...

The obvious answer would be of course not, that the two things are completely different. Astringency can be mistaken for bitterness, but they're different. Then lately I've been considering how paired forms of mineral taste and certain feel aspects tend to couple, if it couldn't be the case that som...

It's interesting how styles of content can lead to liking books or not, not only the ideas but how they are framed, and how selection choices are made. Something like Tony Gebely's Tea: A User's Guide might appeal to people approaching tea as he does, sort of a engineer's breakdown approach, but som...

I might add something for having tried a number of their teas, a sample set. The oolongs were particularly interesting, along with that sheng being novel: http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.com/2021/09/sikkim-and-manipur-indian-oolong.html Indian oolong never really seems like oolong to me, but I ...

It later occurred to me that a German contact published a tea book not so long ago: https://www.amazon.com/Learning-brewing-easy-way-better/dp/B088N4WKDS/ It's pretty good, but introductory themed work would only go so deep, and narrower topic or research oriented work would be different. Some of th...

I just reviewed a book that's new enough to have not been mentioned, released in the last month or two, Geography of Chinese Tea, by Sergey Shevelev, the founder and owner of Moychay. It's pretty good. There's always room for improvement, or for critique of this or that idea, and all the more for so...

It was a reference to both of them, to Tea Mania and Mei Leaf. But again, I just don't put much stock in tea plant age claims in general. Or the wild origin and somewhat more natural growth designations. Of course all of it could really mean something that could affect the outcome of the tea charact...

What you say makes perfect sense, that comparing the items that are familiar for pricing and style is a reliable approach. In this case I think the owner's inconsistency in setting pricing or mark-up might be helpful, not dialed in related to pricing sheng cakes at a market rate, a bit low instead o...

I moved all my puerh into some food-grade plastic buckets. I've switched to buckets with gamma-seal lids for my grains, and that left several nice buckets free, and they turn out to be just large enough for all the puerh and Liu Bao. I make zero attempt to regulate humidity and yet there has been s...

...I live in Zürich and am no stranger to greatly inflated prices... Have you tried teas from Tea Mania, based in Switzerland, and if so what was your impression of them? As I see it that's one of the best sources for sheng on the internet, and it's only a matter of time until the owner gains more ...

I have mixed feelings about Mei Leaf, which I usually communicate as criticism, because the negative parts really stand out. They sell decent tea, it's just that it's possible to buy as good or better tea for less (or at least that's the conventional take, which I've only experienced based on much e...

One person ordering it mentioned on their instagram post seems to indicate a lot of interest, or it's that plus one review, that hides negative comments behind Discord group self-promotion? You've got to hand it to Mei Leaf for having plenty of nerve though, selling shu for 50 cents a gram. Maybe us...