TeaForum.org

I réalise this is a crazy question.

Ive been an avid tea drinker since at a young age. I drink coffee too, just in the morning once and I never buy more than one type of coffee, just my usual arabica. Now tea is another story, I hoard, I buy, I drink it all and I buy again. We’ve changed countries so many times and my tea has always been packed with me. Question is, how do you manage storage? Cups, teapots and unending tea collection? Ideas of organizing so I don’t swim in tea bags

take a look here for inspiration:

viewforum.php?f=63
viewforum.php?f=25

i keep my tea in cardboard boxes (the lidded kind used for filing papers) and my teaware in a dedicated cabinet.
i keep puerh in a "pumidor" mini fridge.

as for how to stop hoarding, idk. i guess slow down and drink what you have if you're running out of room

Ah nice idea, I have plenty of those boxes.
My basement is cool, humidity ok for European summers. Would storing them there be ok? My sencha is in the fridge and I have no other teas rather then Taiwanese and Chinese black teas. No Pu’er.

You don't... Those who did, if anybody like that exists, are likely no longer frequenting this forum...

true

I don't see a problem for teas that will age. For teas that don't age...

I'm glad to know there are others with a larger tea collection than most people would think is reasonable.

I've found a couple strategies for combatting the urge to hoard tea. The first is to keep track of how many grams I consume. Whenever I finish a pouch of tea, I record it, and I also record the number of grams of tea that I buy. If I've consumed 800 g so far this year and bought 1,500 g, I know I need to stop buying for a while. Some people have more sophisticated tracking systems.

The other strategy is to buy only as much of a given tea type as I'll think I'll get through in a year, especially for teas that don't age well. Opening a three-year-old pack of green oolong and realizing it's lost most of its flavour is disappointing, to say the least.

Of course, neither of these methods is foolproof, and I still have a lot of tea.

Eventually, you’ll fill out with enough tea, and no more room (like pants waist line), and you’ll know when to back off on purchasing more. I have a 7’ credenza just for tea, using labeled plastic bins to organize all the different teas (no off smell), plus Japanese teas in a lower compartment of the refrigerator. Some years back I over purchased shincha, so much that I ended up writing about aged refrigerated shincha / sencha, and other aged Japanese teas . Some mistakes, like over buying, can lead to interesting discoveries.

Also, if you can wait, any tea can age to something drinkable again… just a question of how long: 50y old green tea can be really nice! Problem is you don’t know for sure if a particular will become something.

There's good advice here from everyone, but as Victoria and Bok say, I like how buying too much tea can sometimes lead to pleasant discoveries.

I bought too much high mountain tea a few years ago, and it's stayed sealed in its packets while I've spent my time drinking darker styles of tea, but it was nice to discover that a packet of 2008 high mountain tea had actually developed a slightly-aged fruity character. If I had tried it when it was only a few years old, it would probably have been 'stale', but instead it had become 'aged' after more than a decade. And I'm currently thinking about opening up a bag of yancha that got 'lost' in a big cardboard box for a few years to see what's happened to it and learn from the experience (and also to see what I think now of a tea that I thought was good a few years back).

Many people around here have systems for storing tea, cataloguing purchases, planning for future needs, etc (and I'm not one of them...). I'm lucky that I drink a lot of old tea, which shouldn't get any worse in the near future. For other styles (which, for me, usually means lighter, greener styles that don't age well), I need to think about whether I really need to click that purchase button.

Overall, I find that thinking about that for every purchase tends to force me to try to buy lower quantities and (hopefully) higher qualities of tea. In my case, it also tends to lead to buying larger amounts of a few teas to have every day or so, instead of buying lots of small samples that I'll never get around to trying (but other people might have different preferences in that regard). We can try to sample broadly to see what's out there, or we can try to be more familiar with just a few styles, but nobody can learn everything there is to know about every style.

We should probably also bear in mind that over-stocking tea isn't too bad compared to some other interests and hobbies that people have; I know someone who collects vintage guitars, and he needs a lot more room than I do...

Andrew

Already mentioned although can't be stressed enough: you'll just run out of space .

Current pricing trends can help putting you off as well.

I'll be breaking the 300kg barrier this month once my latest tea boxes arrive. Have been forced to rearrange my storage three times this year just to fit my latest orders, this last one implies i can't buy more tea... can't just leave it outside... so either i manage to order a whole new custom cabinet or just can't buy anything else.

If you have to move around then... i'd say your limit is lower so whether you like or not... that wall is chasing you already.

The trick is to figure out what itch it is scratching. For some people, tea is a cheap trip overseas, so buying teas from several different countries is like a world tour. That isn't a terribly harmful urge, so then the trick is just to shrink it down, if you can. If you have a local teashop, buying samples from them will scratch the itch, and as there is no shipping and handling involved, it isn't as burdensome on a local tea-seller as it would be buying online. Plus, you might find a tea you genuinely enjoy,

For some people, it is in response to a roadblock. Sort of like people who love making lists of the things they need to do but never seem to cross anything off. Some people love to buy tea in preparation for tea parties that they never hold. Not to sound scornful, this often means that there is some problem that they isn't related to having the physical tea available or the desire to host, but that they haven't quite figured out yet. It is a form of magical thinking, "If I reach some critical mass of tea, a tea party will just happen around me, like spontaneous combustion-" that sounds silly when you say it, but not so silly when you wish it. It's true, a kilogram of tea can be gone in an instant when split among a sufficiently large group having tea regularly, but the plans must be made.

If this dilemma is not addressed, it can sometimes turn a person into a tea-Gollum, a sort of sour grapes scenario where people start to think that their tea is too good for others anyhow, but the appeal still remains. A natural limiter on this was tea going stale, but the discovery of ageable teas have made it easier for people to be tempted down this path. In this case, the best I can suggest is to ask yourself if you can remember what made you want to drink tea more than once in the first place -- a lot of times, a lifelong tea hobby is started through one fond memory.

Occasionally it is due to commercial peer-pressure. What I mean here is that some teas designed for heavy drinkers are so cheap that they really don't sell the tea in amounts a lighter drinker can use. A lot of CTC British-style teas are in this boat, where the shipping on a quarter-pound costs more than the tea itself, but unless you buy direct it will have already gone stale, because the shelf life is only a few months. This one is hard to solve directly. The indirect solution is to buy tea in a different grade, such as orthodox broken, which naturally has a longer shelf-life. The cost goes up compared to CTC, but the pressure goes down, which leads to less bulk purchases.

Thank you all ‘ for your input. It’s actually given me some great ideas. I store sencha green tea in wine cooler fridge and I consume it along the year. That is the tea that I usually have to have daily. The rest I have them stored in the basement in this cabinet. I also made the mistake of not properly storing a gui fei oolong… only to find the most bitter stale tea I’ve ever tried. . Lesson learned.

Thank you all for your ideas, I’m reading through all the forum discussions you sent me, good stuff there. I just need two more orders to arrive and I think I’ll be a good civilian and stop this madness

Teas are top shelves, extra Teaware bottomless

Teafortea wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 13, 2022 2:26 am

. I also made the mistake of not properly storing a gui fei oolong… only to find the most bitter stale tea I’ve ever tried. . Lesson learned.

Not a real mistake - you just found out that this was low quality tea to begin with! Stale but bitter, doesn’t sound like something that happened due to bad storage. Unless you also had sour notes?