And so it begins.
A dear friend gifted me one of these http://camellia-sinensis.com/teapot/fiche/Mr.+Chen+teapot+CH-5 and it arrived on Wednesday afternoon. I used the last of my Upton Tea Celestial Tribute shou pu-erh to season the pot using the method that David Duckler enumerated here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wzsBNHO6C4
My car had a series of unexpected problems over the past two weeks, only a small fraction of which was covered by insurance, and so my plans to order lots of unusual and exotic teas is on hold until my checkbook can recover from the trauma. Meanwhile, my usual order from Upton of black dragon, yunnan gold rare grade and wang pu-erh will have to keep me sustained.
The great news, of course, is that this means I have a shou seasoned yixing and I have shou tea leaves!
I have to say, this brand new pot should be greedy, stealing most of the flavor of this first steep (after a rinse), and yet, the flavor and mouth feel of this cup are as full and lovely as they ever are.
Does anyone know if any real development actually still goes on with the Steepster code base? It seems to me they need to separate actual tasting notes from our daily drinking logs. We’ve made this into a very social space, and a kind of “tea journal” but all that information ends up cluttering up the pages for the actual teas and makes it hard to find new teas to try when you have to read through all the bits about someone’s day.
I want us to keep the social aspect, but I think the site would be a lot richer if there was a static area for tasting notes, and review which you could update or leave alone, and then a tea diary that was tied to your profile, but not the tea pages. Hmmm…