the rise of the curator-specialist tea vendors

So I’ve been out of actively researching new tea vendors for a while – I spent a bunch of years putting tea on a a kind of constant steady back-burner, and learning to roast my own coffee, and all that. And, you know, I tend to avoid opening the research door sometimes, for fear of going down an obsessive hole and spending my life’s savings in a couple weeks.

But: after a long absence from the tea world, I’m back, and incredibly startled to find how many good new vendors there are. Like, when I started getting really into Chinese and Taiwanese tea (like in 2001), information was so spotty, and vendors often unreliable, and I’d rely on friends making trips to China and even the good shops were a mix of great and OK stuff. But now I’m back and it’s like: wealth overload.

Anyway, I’m particularly interested in the rise of this new type, this small, ultra-specialized shop, carefully curated. Back in my day (god I sound old), most of the western-facing shops had to be kind of generalists, and most tried to give sort of broad representation of various types. Now we seem to have all these shops where the owner has very particular tastes, and curates their tea according to their tastes. This is new to me: all these, narrow, precise little shops, with house styles.

I think this is utterly fabulous, because when I find a curator whose taste matches mine, it now feels like I can just order with trust. This is how I feel about, like, White2Tea. Back in the day, I’d never order a whole cake without sampling. But by this point, it now feels like there’s not even a point to sampling for me with White2Tea – his taste is so close to mine, I pretty much can’t go wrong.

So I’m interested in making a list of this kind of curator-specialist with this kind of internal reliability, and trying to get a sense of their house styles. Mostly because, since I was gone for so long from active tea research, I wonder what I’ve been missing. And it’s a great thing, right, to have a guide you trust completely?

Here’s my list, from my last 6 months of (explosively) re-entering active tea-vendor researching. And a few old favorites.

White2Tea: the sterling example of all this, in my book. White2Tea has a very specific style – some have called it rich and heavy, but I think it’s more than that: it’s extremely about the gestalt. A lot of his best teas are less about richness of flavor notes, and more about this weird, ineffable harmony between flavor and texture and body feel and weird, active life.

Crimson Lotus Tea: the difference between CLT and W2T is fascinating to me. I’ve only dipped my toe into a few of their teas, but they all seem to be extremely energetic, extremely floral, and very much about these active sensations of light and life-fulness. (I’m thinking, especially, of Midas Touch, which seems so representative, because it feels like a cross between sunshine and a tide pool). All three teas I have from them remind me of what I love about white teas, but triple-charged.

Norbu: the house style seems so clear across rolled oolongs and wuyis and puerhs: big, fat, deep flavors. He seems to love those rich, plummy, datey, vast warm flavors. This is actually not my chief aesthetic in wuyi (I often love the dry mineral scalpel to the skull) but sometimes, it’s exactly what I crave, and I have a number of friends who love Norbu stuff reliably the most every time.

Tea Yuan: the end-point of my obsessive search for a new trustworthy wuyi vendor. There’s definitely a sense of taste the guides all their teas, and I can’t put my finger on it, except that the balance between sharp-dryness, slow-building warm aftertastes, and mouth-sensations is always really good. There’s really good attention to the interface between the various sensory factors, and that’s extremely rare in my book. I’m just starting with them, but I’m starting to think, for my tastes, they’re the yancha equivalent of W2T: utterly trustworthy at each price point, and full of living, breathing, cross-sensory, gestalt-perfect tea.

Life in a Teacup: an interestingly hard-to-pin-down house style. There’s no single feel or taste or anything, but I will say: each one of their teas I’ve had, there was some weird subtle surprising grace note, some little unusual corner in the tea, that I hadn’t seen before. So I guess that’s the house style.

Tea Habitat: the first vendor-curator I was really aware of, and it’s hard for me to say what unites her dancong, because I basically learned to drink dancong in her shop, and all I can say is that all other dancong tastes wrong to me, and only her’s tastes alive. It’s probably spiritually bad, but…

Final note: Interestingly, some of my favorite shops aren’t on this list precisely because they don’t have a house style. Tea Trekker is a fascinating opposite to this for me. Instead of having a house style, Tea Trekker seems very… “true” to me. Like each tea is exactly what it is, and they’re not exerting any particular taste or style. Same with Tea Masters – I always found Stephane’s teas to be really distinct. Maybe the thing to say is he’s interested in the quiet differences of terroir, so we wouldn’t get a house style from him?

Anyway, the point of this long-windedness was to ask: who am I missing?