How do you store tea in a hot house?

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doomslayer
Posts: 40
Joined: Mon Feb 17, 2020 6:45 pm
Location: Seattle, WA

Sun Jun 26, 2022 10:58 am

Hello! So far I’ve always rented a house with a basement that stays cool even in summer and I just kept tea in ziplocks there. We just finally got our first house and it doesn’t come with a basement so I need to figure something out now.

How do you store teas? Are there some special fridges or containers for that? Do I need to do it for all the teas including pu-erh cakes or just the greener teas? My tentative plan is to get a separate small fridge (or share space in the wine fridge) and put it there in ziplocks.
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debunix
Posts: 1812
Joined: Sat Oct 21, 2017 1:27 am
Location: Los Angeles, CA

Sun Jun 26, 2022 11:31 am

I am not sure if mine qualifies as a 'hot house': I live in Los Angeles and have air conditioning, but I do my best to avoid heating up the outside world by turning it on too soon, so my 'room temperature often gets to the low eighties in the summertime.

I store unopened senchas and gyokuro and matcha and a few more delicate green teas in the refrigerator. I bring them out and let them sit unopened for several hours to overnight before first opening to minimize condensation, and only have one matcha, one sencha/gyokuro, and one delicate green open at a time.

Everything else is room temperature, stored in the original bags/pouches/paper wraps. I keep the mylar bags sealed, and store puerhs in unsealed ziplock bags (the bags are basically there to protect the original wrappers). Puerhs are now in buckets with lids that are not tightly sealed; sealed mostly unopened teas are in an antique trunk. FYI, I am not trying to deliberately age my puerhs, but rather buy them as I like them so I'm not bothering with controlling temps and humidity.

Although I do keep them at room temp, I also limit how many green oolongs I keep open at a time because they do lose often quite a lot of their freshness quickly; I'm starting to do this more for black teas as well. And once in a while I meet a deep roast oolong where the newly opened tea is all aggressive roast, and I put those loosein a large teapot to air out for a while, keeping the lid on to minimize dust & keep out any bugs.

And I don't worry about how many deep roast oolongs, balhyocha, kukicha, puerhs and hei cha I have open at once, limiting myself by how much room I have for these in a set of boxes on my tea shelf.
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doomslayer
Posts: 40
Joined: Mon Feb 17, 2020 6:45 pm
Location: Seattle, WA

Sun Jun 26, 2022 11:56 am

debunix wrote:
Sun Jun 26, 2022 11:31 am
I am not sure if mine qualifies as a 'hot house': I live in Los Angeles and have air conditioning, but I do my best to avoid heating up the outside world by turning it on too soon, so my 'room temperature often gets to the low eighties in the summertime.
Thanks for the info! This works in pretty funny ways - I am way north of you in Seattle so you’d think it’s a non-issue here. Except by default houses here come without AC because who needs that when summers always stay at comfy temperatures. But then lately for some mysterious reasons (nobody could see this coming, I know) we started getting these brutal once-in-a-thousand-years heatwaves and I just don’t know how sensitive the tea is to these. Especially the darker teas like pu-erhs that I expect to sit around for years.
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