2015: How much will you spend on tea this year?

Hooooookay. I’m not bothering to add, but I estimate that the total is somewhere over $400, not counting teaware. A lot of the teaware is for gongfu: tea tray, cha hai, jian shui pot, etc.

Discovering puerh really changed my tea buying habits. I spent $188 on black, green, and oolong teas in 2015 and $1,013 on puerh. The goal for next year is to sip down samples rather than buying more tea. Otherwise, I need more storage space.

2013 was the year I got into gongfu tea, but I spent my money modestly that year, mostly working to create a basic and usable gongfu tea set, and I barely branched outside of Shang Tea, the company that introduced me to high quality loose tea (I think we all do the baby-bird attachment thing to our first good tea company for a little bit before trying much else).

In 2014 I went through a teaware-amassing phase where I started wanting a variety of sets to serve with and spent probably an equal amount on tea and teawares, but in 2015 I went through a huge change in tastes and sold off nearly all of my mass-produced or flashy looking teawares and only kept the really simple or handmade ones. Then I discovered Taiwan Tea Crafts which hooked me into a rather pathetic cycle of “Okay, I have enough teawares,” followed by “Oh my god look at these new teawares they just put in the store. Why are they doing this to me?” I got a couple one-of-a kind pieces that were probably outside my budget… and just as I finally felt I had a diverse enough array of teawares for any brewing situation, I stopped being skeptical of unglazed teawares and started getting curious… got bit by the yixing bug… which opened a new wormhole. Oops.

Needless to say I did not buy nearly enough new tea in 2015 because I kept being compelled by teaware purchases and thinking “tea is momentary, but these teawares last forever”. I think I have mustered up the self-control now to nip this in the bud before it becomes an unhealthy addiction (though I’m making an exception for when I finally find a tokoname shiboridashi set for gyokuro, which is the only type of teaware I want but don’t have). I also picked up my first Puer cakes in 2015 and started a modest aging operation, which was nice, and I don’t really intend to buy more than another cake or two next year.

So definitely my goal in 2016 is to budget for tea and not for teawares. I think I’m going to try to focus on trying more Wuyi oolongs and reds b/c those are what my unglazed pots are dedicated to. But I’d also like to try more greens especially b/c I feel I haven’t tried a diverse enough array of them. Some new whites also wouldn’t hurt. Yeah, my tea stock has suffered from teaware-itis, but I’m on it. I hope. Teaware.house opening up a few weeks ago was a blow to me late in the year when I had already resolved not to buy more teawares… so I decided to put that resolution into effect in 2016 instead of right now. Wish me strength this coming year. Haha.

Every time I think I’m ready to add up my tab for 2015 I find myself buying more tea or teaware.

I went on a tea buying hiatus a few months ago when I got a big haul, naively thinking I had enough to last me for the rest of the year. Boy, how wrong I was! Black friday rolled around and I couldn’t pass up WP and Tea from Vietnam deals. I thought for sure I was now done buying tea. But a week later I had a minor emergency when my green tea stash began running low and I immediately used my reward points to pick up a few samples from Teavivre.

The holidays rolled around and suddenly my massive chamomile stash which I once feared I’d never get rid of, was depleted so off I went to Amazon to order more. No sooner had I clicked submit, when my favorite high mountain oolong ran out sigh Another order went out yesterday to Yunnan Sourcing.

Then this morning, I stopped by the mall to return something and spotted the most gorgeous kyusu in Adagio’s window display…ughhh. There’s two days left in the year now and I seriously don’t trust myself.

I’ll report back next year…

I don’t anticipate spending anything on tea other than on herbals/fruit blends as I’m about to run out of those, and any other categories that I manage to sip down (would love to place an order with Harney and Samovar if I get sufficient sipdowns in).

The exception to this might be pu-erh as I don’t have that much of it and I’ve been eyeing the White2tea and Mandala sites. I keep putting things in my shopping cart and not buying them, mostly because I am having an internal struggle over whether I can justify buying any more tea at all. Secondarily because the total at White2tea was freakishly high after I finished dumping things into my cart. ;-) I went looking for coupon codes to see if I could find one that would bring down the total but alas.