Sheng and Shou TTB - Round 1 completed
I’m interested in donating tea for the next round :-)
unfortunately I have to skip next round. Summer vacation i will spend in mountains with kids. i wont be able to get to PO. its like 30min drive.
Suggestion: 2-3g of sample should not be left . i took several of those lonely tiny bits to free the space. dont know how i would even sample them .
Another thing -open foil sample please staple it.
Thanks for the feedback. There’ll probably be a third round :)
Re the small samples, I often do just 2 grams, but am not sure what to do with a 1.1 gram sample. Too good a tea not to try, though.
how do you brew them? Western ? i think i have a tiny gaiwan somewhere and i will fill it 1/2 full
I’ve sampled quite a bit of pu using 2g, gongfu style. I use a 60ml gaiwan and fill it to about 45-50ml. 5s rinse, then start with 15-20s steep
I’d like to be in round 2!
I think better packaging of the teas would be nice. Too many single sandwich ziplock baggies and taped shut packages. I dunno if you want to go as far as getting a couple big ziplock freezer bags and separating sheng/shou and minituochas with rice/rose/whatever.
I’m most definitely interested in the next round, if it’s OK for me to join again. I could be towards the end of the line, since I was one of the very first people.
As far feedback on how to improve the box, I like Awkward Soul’s suggestion. Instead of mostly separating by companies.
This is my favorite TTB so far. Best part was being able to try different shengs in frame of time and train my palate.
I’m thinking that we should somehow juggle the order so that people don’t follow the same people as before. Not sure how that will work out. Bear in mind that with respect to the tea selection, this is a very mature box, so there won’t be much difference there.
Glad you liked the box. It was different from all the other boxes I’ve seen. Something fun for the pu addicts out there!
I’d love to join if you’ll have a pu noob :) I have a large selection, so I can add back what I try.
I? Am DROWNING in tea so I will give up my spot and let someone else have a chance. There is a LOT of nice tea in the box. I enjoyed it a lot. Y’all have fun with it. Not that I think its even remotely necessary, but if need more tea Dr Jim, let me know and I’ll send you some.
MzPriss:
Thanks for the offer, but I think we’re about at the sweet spot for size. We have about 60 teas, with enough for a few samples of most. Plus,you may have noticed that Whispering Pines has offered a few samples, which will add some bulk to the box.
I’d also say don’t step aside if you would enjoy it. We can always just have a few more slots than last time.
Like MzPriss I’m good on tea for now and I will bow out as well. Spring teas are coming up and I hope to taste a few of these.
The tea box traveled really fast which I think added to the fun. Depending upon the people involved, which means people with puerh collections vs people just getting started, a more curated box amongst people with puerh collections might be more useful. By that I mean people digging into their collections rather than vendor samples. I find vendors samples almost undrinkable lately, the teas are often old and dried out and nowhere near representative of the actual cake/tuo from the vendor or in a cared-for collection.
I may be the only one interested in this stuff, but I did a bit of statistical review of the box. It probably says something about how steepsterites (is that a word?) drink their Pu-erh.
After deleting 5 teas that I started the box with that weren’t very popular, we have 62 teas in the box. They divided pretty evenly: 34 shou, 26 sheng, one blend and one unknown.
I was a bit surprised that 20 of 62 teas were from Yunnan Sourcing. Also surprised to see only one Tea Urchin and one White-2-Tea, both of which I had put in the box. There were 8 Mandala (no surprise), 4 Teavivre, 6 Lahahaha (presumably from the same person?) and three each from Jalam and Puerhshop.
All the white2tea and Tea Classico I put in was gone before you got the box. The problem is not the people choosing to take these, but that the teas are so expensive! 20 grams of 2005 Naka is around $25, and this is only enough tea for two decent sessions.
I came after Cwyn and I took a Tea Classico that I think was around 5 grams. I left the Naka because I have a cake, but there was a lot of nice tea in there. And more really great tea got put in after me. I forgot about my Tea Urchins, I would have put some in there. I just found a whole Tea Urchin stash I had forgotten about.
That’s probably part of it. I noticed your stuff was pretty popular. It’s no surprise that there is a certain descent to the bottom in this sort of exercise. Last time I ran a box, I pruned it when it returned to me.
This time, I removed a few of my “starter teas”, but otherwise probably won’t do much. There doesn’t seem to be much junk, just a few less desirable teas. Thing is, some people may want to sample value teas because that’s what they buy. The best thing about tea boxes is variety, and for me, it’s worth trading down a bit for the experience.
Doesn’t surprise me to see a lot of Yunnan Sourcing. They have a LOT of great tea and their samples are a luxurious 25 grams and I have never had a freshness issue with one of their samples.
But in a TTB we have no idea how long people have had the samples. YS does not vacuum-pack their samples, few vendors do. I find YS samples rather dry and I ask not to be sent any when I order.
Well true we don’t know, but I frequently poke holes in mine with a pin and put them in the shengidor if they are raw. Still working on the flower foam shoumidor.
The good thing about puerh is that it is SUPPOSED to be old. Of course, the conditions of flying around the country aren’t very good for the tea, but that’s an argument for taking samples then waiting a few weeks to try them. If you want stale tea, try taking Spring green tea from a tea box.
Old is different from dried out, puerh is ruined if it is too dried out. It goes flat. One vendor sample I took from the tea box was completely flat and tasteless, and I tossed it, it was a puerhshop.com sample. And it is likely not the person’s fault who added it, the tea had 7 years on it already. For all we know, puerhshop.com bagged that sample 7 years ago. Big vendors with dozens and dozens of teas bag hundreds of samples, and six months later is another harvest. There is a world of difference between that sample Baggie and the very same full size tea in a cared-for owner’s hands.
And airline cargo compartments are notoriously cold and dry. Not to mention the backs of mail trucks this Winter. Still, I think it’s worth doing.
I’ve never had a problem with YS samples. Always fresh. The samples I put in are the ones I tried and bought a full size cakes. They are my personal favorites.
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