Bok wrote: ↑Tue Jan 01, 2019 2:20 pm
swordofmytriumph wrote: ↑Tue Jan 01, 2019 1:32 pm
That’s really cool info. So it seems that even if I did live in a place where higher quality was available, it would be a lot of money/effort to even be “allowed” to get the good stuff. Like, a cultural thing? It’s cool that tea is taken so serieously there.
Out of curiosity, for the stuff that isn’t openly on sale, do people who “meet the requirements” for tea excellence just build relationships with shops so the proprietor knows them and will sell to them, or what? I’m imagining someone going into a shop in another city and asking for the secret menu or something.
I had the same experience. I was told after 5 years buying tea, letting me taste their top quality gaoshan, that I can not buy it, that I still need another few years before I am ready
Basically, asking for it will not help. One can tell by how you drink, or comment on certain teas how much you know, or not. You have to bare in mind that in Asia you taste the tea before you buy. Leaves a lot to observe for the seller. If they care. Some just think foreigners can not appreciate it in any way, so they will never sell to you. Luckily not too many are like this.
Introductions can help as well. And little tokens of appreciations. Well, like any relationship really.
Not to continue going totally off topic, but it does all seem relevant to this discussion.... Interestingly I can see a lot of parallels between tea, particularly the expansion of the western market, and that of (craft) beer, which is where most of my time/drinking was done prior to getting interested in tea. There are plenty of beers which are considered world class or classic benchmarks for particular styles due to their quality and consistency (for example many of the Trappist beers after the monasteries revamped their production processes), some which are excellent but hard to acquire due to smaller scale production for the sake of quality control, and those that are just hard to get and maybe good but not great (or sometimes even bad) but become desirable just out of rarity or because they are a curiosity. Often getting your hands on particular beers was difficult and while you could maybe find certain things by jumping around store to store asking everywhere you could, I always had better lucky by cultivating a relationship with the buyers at a couple smaller stores where I was a regular. They came to know me and my tastes, would sell me things they had ordered in just for themselves or set particular rare things aside for me even without my asking, as well as point me to things I didn't know but would probably appreciate more than other people because they knew my tastes. Occasionally I would pull a small special bottle out of my basement or buy them a drink to show appreciation. Also by building friendships with a few other enthusiasts we would tip each other off, pick up spare bottles for each other or drink them together, swap for other things like rare records, or pull something out of the basement after 8 years. But importantly we knew what the other person liked and usually had similar tastes - it wasn't about getting something just because it supposedly was the best or hardest to get. And similarly, sharing something special in a small select group always seemed the best way to drink said beer.
As interest in craft beer grew I felt like I saw more and more people running around wanting to try every type of "rare" beer they could get their hands on with little to no appreciation for certain subtleties or being totally uneducated and only having been interested in anything other than Bud or drinking to get drunk for maybe a couple months. I don't want to shoot down people just for enjoying themselves, but time and time again I would hear about some amazing beer only to get a chance to try it and find it to actually be incredibly bad by the standards of that style, or even of what makes a beer objectively good in terms of brewing technique. Using techniques like barrel aging to cover up for off-notes in the beer or an inability to get something really good and interesting tasting without it, sort of equivalent I guess to someone masking a poorly produced tea with aroma oils.
I don't want to start trouble by generalizing but I get the feeling perhaps we in the west (and in my experience younger guys in particular) tend to get very enthusiastic about things like this (say a specialist area/field that requires some deep dives to even start to fully understand said thing's diversity and variations and potential quality) and jump in very quickly while often forgetting that the ability to buy up lots of said thing or try lots of said thing in a short period is no substitute for time, experience, and also importantly education by others with more experience. I feel like I have seen on some other tea discussion areas a similar tendency, and that some western shops' businesses seem to thrive on these personality types- watch some youtube, spend a few hundred dollars, buy what a salesman and a bunch of other amateurs tell you is the best, and suddenly you are a tea expert. Enthusiasm can go along way but it is no substitute for an education, and a real education isn't something you can simply purchase. And while it is never fun to be totally written off by someone based on your age, race, or appearance, I can appreciate people who guard and treasure a thing they know and love from such behavior, or at least give someone a skeptical once over and require a bit of proof from someone before sharing certain things to know it will be appreciated.