Haiwan, TuLin... the less known? less popular?

Puerh and other heicha
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Joined: Wed Nov 21, 2018 2:10 pm
Location: Germany

Thu Oct 06, 2022 3:09 pm

My Pu knowledge over other hei cha is still quite limited so forgive any misconceptions here... while DaYi still seems to be king of inflated prices in the factory tea world while they seem to sit at the top there are what I've kind of come to think of as I guess second string factories - those typically started by ex-employees and then often times imitating a style of the prior factory, often at a lower price point.

Main ones to me are
Haiwan seeming closes to DaYi including many of their own direct imitations of classic recipes
TuLin teas seeming closest in style to me as Xiaguan though a bit more mild

I imagine there are other comparisons to be made here by those more knowledgeable than me.

My interest in this area has been growing and I'm looking to do some more sampling in this area. As prices on certain factory recipes go way up with age and boutique pu production starts at often significantly higher price marks these factories potentially offer quite good value for cost, especially for daily drinkers. Obviously brand loyalty, advertising, market control, so on play some role here- but of course so do other factors that actually impact the product like access to material.

I've tried a few different TuLin teas so far, and while there were a couple flops there were also some that I thought were quite nice. I don't know how much of it is what I have access to in the western market, but to me the main downfall of a lot of these teas has been their storage- with the exception of my one HK stored TuLin tuo everything I have found has been in quite dry storage, if not like cryogenic time freeze or detrimentally dry storage. I don't know if this is due to often being cheaper teas that they get put in or picked up by vendors with less careful or high quality storage to begin with... it makes it harder for me to feel like I can make judgements on the material as a whole because some of the teas I've had did seem like the material could be quite decent had said tuo or cake not been stored in the vacuum of space to ensure it is still as green as the day it was pressed 10+ years later. Haiwan seems to show up a bit more frequently in more favorable storage conditions but also most often from dry kunming storage from what I've seen. Anyone have much experience with these or similar factory teas and have any vendor suggestions? Even taobao sellers who don't have such dry storage?
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