cbrace wrote: ↑Sat Oct 31, 2020 2:48 pm
So my back-of-the-envelope calculation is that you are talking about around 200 kilos of tea to last you forty years, and you should have that quantity by within a month or so. Correct?
That's absolutely correct, yes. In fact, suspect i already am over the 200Kg goal.
Never imagined i'd go to such lengths. By late 2019 i did place some large tea-orders from Chinese/China-based sellers just to have a big amount of tea stored and from that point onwards just raise the bar and buy at a slower pace, much more focused on teas i truly liked. This initial kinda-forced investment was motivated by sheer pessimism keeping in mind several factors, then year 2020 came and reality surpassed ( and keep surpassing ) my worst expectations and then it prompted me to go full speed even though it's really burning my pocket at one of those points in time where i should do the very opposite.
Mentioning that part to explain why i still am in the "suspect" phase:
Created a spreadsheet to check on the teas i have filed by type including as much relevant information as i can about each one ( weight included, although most of the time i'm going with generic numbers ) plus several blank cells for future notes about tasting over the coming years.
This way i also can see - aproximately - how many Kg of tea i have . Right now it's 173.62Kg on the puerh/heicha/pressed teas sheet + 12.56Kg on the loose leaf sheet, however... noting everything down takes a while and have been lagging behind but i've managed to be almost up to date and am only missing one large order ( 20kg+ ) completed on early september so it's safe to assume i might have 205Kg+ on my storage by now... plus i have another open - large - tea order that will be completed by the end of this month / early december and potentially a couple smaller orders ( 5Kg minus / each ) on november & early december... and that'd be it for a good while.
That's quite ambitious! Sounds like a good investment to me, at least in the non-financial way (I have no interest in or understanding of speculation).
Exactly my thoughts. Can't deny i feel overwhelmed and hoping i didn't overdo it, but once again... unless my health takes a severe twist as radical as to keep me away from tea, so far i'm convinced my profile is perfect ( in theory only, no such thing as perfection after all ) for this venture.
Zero interest on any type of speculation with tea either plus i don't see any future for it; unless i am mistaken private collectors based anywhere within Europe selling teas from their private stash has zero - or "close to" - interest on the global market plus we already have a few reliable stores around to hold on to ( plus MoyChay seems to be finally opening their Amsterdam store next month !! great news as well !! hope there's a price-parity on the dutch version ) .
Buying tea for personal consumption will never get cheaper; in fact I suspect quality tea will continue to rise in price as the Chinese middle class grows.
This is one of the main keys that prompted me to do it ( although we can obviously add more to the list ), have been checking & compiling all kind of graphs, articles, relevant info, etc.. from several sources, cross-checking figures... and then did the same with the tea markets only to notice the expected similarities and factors ( rural exodus, average salaries growing ... ) ... and it's certainly visible with the newer productions reaching higher & higher prices each year... and the chances to find affordable ( "dirty cheap" by current standards ) yet great teas becoming as rare as spotting some
vaquita in the wild. I still remember buying 100g bags of teas i absolutely love for $5 , $6 ... a full regular 357g cake ( not high grade this one, but drinkable & enjoyable ) for $16/$18 ( all shipped ) on late 2019 ... these even weren't ( by far ) the best deals you could get by then, just teas you'd bump into on well known stores like Farmer-Leaf or Chawang not needing to resource to TaoBao, private circles, the aliexpress lottery ( some apparently manage to find amazing deals every once in a while here ) ... but those kind of deals on regular stores disappeared just at the beginning of 2020 plus now you also have to take added expenses ( higher shipping rates, customs ) into account.
Another key was European customs getting more & more strict ( now even stopping teas containing fungus, golden flowers, chinese orchids, essential oils, etc... which are banned; also, have been reported tea orders arriving opened including cakes with missing chunks that were taken for analysis ) since Trump sent those infamous $30 million to the postal union on september 2019... and the fact that by january 2021 everything coming from outside the EU will be stopped no matter the size/value... and i expect the vast majority of international parcels will be thoroughly checked ( more than ever before ) as well. This is a combination of extra trouble + extra money you have to account for when ordering.
And finally you have all this turmoil going on that can turn into anything at any given point. The biggest variable but also the most dangerous one.
With everything in mind... and not going to hide it was point #3 the one i feared the most... all factors pointed to this decision being the right one - provided i managed to pull it - because even if one or two out of those three negative keys took a sudden positive twist... the remaining one would always have enough negative impact to validate going forward anyways.
As a bonus:
These last 12 months also helped me look at my tea purchases from a very different perspective. Usually the vast majority of tea drinkers place small orders including plenty samples and "big orders" being those where you commit to a whole cake... whereas i've been blind-buying whole cakes ( multiple cakes or even tongs ) and essentially became an anomaly - even if temporary for this venture has a limit - where i've been essentially a buyer on steroids.
The experience has been unique, the perspective gained has been decidedly different, the impact - whether the experience was good or bad - definitely heavier... deeper .
Needless to say the weight of your decisions when you ride such a "truck" also force you to reflect more and think 500 times about it before going ahead, fortunately ... this is where the value of tea communites & tea bloggers / reliable tea-sites shine. Out of all the hundreds of cakes i bought "blind" ( obviously still going through 'em ) based on other people feedback i've yet to be disappointed... and more often than not those teas even exceed my expectations.
So far only have come across two failures where i risked buying multiple cakes... but those two were personal bets with zero references. This is probably a side-effect of blind-buying hundreds of cakes and being happy with everything ... to the point i probably felt like playing the lottery, immune to failure... only to be faced with the harsh reality, it's one thing to blind-buy tea with community reference... quite different going into the wild ( a basic lesson i was aware of before jumping to it ) . The worst part is that my gut told me to get away from both but did it anyways.
For those curious about the two duds and just to have a community reference:
1) The first one was a white tea pressed cake. Sold by TeaSoul ( Italy ) which has their own website... although sold through Amazon UK :
https://www.teasoul.net/en/white-tea/10 ... 07646.html
They changed the picture recently on the Teasoul webshop but it's essentially the same reference.
Bought 4 ( four !!! ) of those... at 10€ each ( shipped ) on one of those odd amazon price movements. It's the worst & most toxic ... "thing" i've ever seen... weirdly pressed, not even sure if these are even pressed tea leaves or anything else, water looks soapy and barely tinted, looks & feels like soap. Right now i don't even know what to do with it, don't even dare to use it as landfill in case it can damage the environment.
For the time being i still keep it on my storage - away from all my other cakes - in case there's a miracle and changes. Received a compressed white tea cake from Teamania time ago that was undrinkable ( way too acidic... way over human tolerance levels ) ... the brew looked like red-dyed water ( missing the usual surface tension when tea blends with water properly ) , 6 months later took a turn for the better, color changed ( dark-brown with a golden hue ) , now it was drinkable ... nice and enjoyable, so i'll give these horrors a few extra months before searching for a proper place to dump 'em .
2) Second one was the 2014 Dr Puer Nannuo cake from Puerhtea.eu ( or Teasenz european front ) .
Entirely my fault. Already aware this was mass market cheap tea, also knew this was sold dirty cheap on ebay years ago ( somewere around $10 or even slightly lower per cake ), also took a screenshot of puerhtea.eu catalogue on early 2020 where it was listed at 19€... and then it was relisted at 38€ ( currently priced even a few eur higher ) ... but once again, spoiled by my early success even with cheap cakes/tuos i considered decent enough... decided to go for it ( not risking the full price which was already absurd, but doing the math of applying the discount for large orders + previous reward points to these specific cakes ) . Bought the three cakes they had in stock back then, now i finally started one... certainly regret it... it's just the text book definition of a cheap & bad tea, something you know by heart it won't get better with time even if you lack the experience.
Oh well, can't complain with such a low failure rate i guess, re-learned a lesson i should have known by now the hard way .
Another important reason was the fact that i want to experiment aging tea and given that you need to invest some decades into it ... that's something anybody with such an interest should start doing yesterday.