Advice to beginners about tea

I found it a little too rambling, with too narrow a focus on some aspects and too wide a focus on some – which I suppose is to be expected in a blog post.
I was looking for something more organised based on the subject title and expected the contents to be on these lines:

Background and history
Types of tea – how they look/smell/taste
How and where different teas are grown
Processing of tea
Tea equipment
Brewing methods
Sourcing tea from across the world
Storage
Online tea resources for further reading

While that may have been my expectation, I believe it is still good of you to have made this post, which contains a lot of useful info for beginners.

Interesting, thanks. That sort of approach would work better for covering all of the initial basics, which I really didn’t try to do. Those types of guides don’t come up much because of that range, and because for a subject like brewing it might seem easy to pass on a starting point but for every single idea there is a range for which it doesn’t apply. I mean that tea gear, proportion, temperature, and brewing time vary a lot by individual tea and personal preference.Types of tea is even worse; it would be hard to summarize oolong fairly in 1000 words, and black and white teas a lot more diverse than it seems. Hei cha and pu’er are much worse; those separate into lots of range, and covering aging and fermentation in a short space is impossible.

I didn’t really plan to extend this to other posts on related themes but I’ll consider it. I answer questions about the other issues in different places so I could cut and paste a good bit of it, or rewrite it. I don’t see myself as a tea expert though, but I do give related ideas some thought and research time.

Your blog posts are an insightful read as always John. As a fairly experienced tea drinker, I can appreciate your perspective however I agree with Psyck that the information could be better organized for beginners. But then again I don’t think you’re aiming this at complete noobs. My guess is the people who come on this site and Reddit who have already gotten their feet wet with loose leaf and want to take the next step, will benefit the most from this blog post.

The list of tea related websites, vendors, blogs, etc. you’re compiled is great. I’m familiar with most of them, but also discovered a couple of new ones to explore. Somehow all I’d never heard of Teapedia until now!

This statement from the blog post really stuck with me:

“One reason online advice could be really hard to gauge is that every statement and idea could be clearly right in one context and wrong in another. "

Very true for many things, not just tea…

Thanks for the feedback. As an engineer I can relate to the approach of breaking tea basics into a half dozen categories and then listing out the first 100 ideas under all those. As a philosopher (per a second education; I don’t think of myself as a philosopher) assumptions and perspective issues factor in prior to that.

Some people will naturally drift straight to Gong Fu brewing aged sheng pu’er, and collecting yixing teapots, and others will take time moving off tea bags and blends into basic types of black, green, and oolong teas, and may or may not ever try pu’er or use anything but Western style brewing. I don’t see either as wrong, and can’t completely embrace the former being a higher form of tea practice. Per my take there is a relatively natural sequence of preference changes but different people would experience that differently.

The point here is that how one chooses and writes out the first 100 ideas depends on some of their own assumptions, and to some extent where they stand and how their path unfolded. It is still possible to write a ten page guide of 7 or 8 basic categories but that’s a much more difficult task than it first seems. Bloggers and various reference sites will pick one narrow subject and cover that in 1000 words or so but the basics would cover a few dozen such references. Writing out a short guide would still leave the problem that those basics would be incomplete and half wrong, related to lots of ideas being true in a limited sense.

Brewing temperature works as an example of what I mean. I included a Reddit cover page table as an example, which I didn’t follow up discussing, but a few parts of that table could be seen as omissions or errors. For example, specifying one temperature for all green tea is essentially wrong; some types do much better at even cooler temperatures, and Vietnamese people tend to prefer using boiling point water, liking the astringency, and they’re not exactly wrong. White tea suggested range varies a lot and they didn’t address that. Exceptions and preference differences extend well beyond that, those just jumped out.

I really appreciate the input here. It’s an interesting thing to consider, how much introduction could be covered in a short space in text.

I would put Chinese grocery store or market teas in the middle between those extremes. It seems an unusual place to level off but that would get you a lot of the experience of drinking diverse and decent tea.

It almost seems a potential trap to want to drink the best of all teas, or to experience them all. There is no best, because preference is enough of a factor that it varies by person. There are gradually better quality versions per typical type but for the most part the absolute highest levels are probably spoken for before the leaves start growing, and most people claiming to besselling those is just hype. A path of exploring more diverse teas and better versions doesn’t need to point towards those types of endpoints. I’d be crazy by now if I worried about what I’venot tried yet.