glowrak guy wrote:I expected due to your good taste in music tools, that you would reply with some good information about teas that were also special.
And there's more ...
This is one area where an online approach could be best. I do not want to sound like company-placement or product-placement, this is only sharing, I have no financial interest in this at all.
Since 10 years now I get my teas online. From Scott Wilson, an American who went to live in Kunming, Yunnan, China. He got into teas there and to make a story short, started to press his own pu'erh tea cakes, as well as going around to farmers and buying teas. And selling them online. Sure, there's storage of the teas implied, although in the case of fresh teas that do not withstand long storage (green, yellow and purple teas mostly) this is great. It's actually possible to get teas a few weeks after they were harvested by the farmer. And then, all the other types of teas, black, rock oolong, jade oolong, shu and sheng pu'erh ... there are a lot of different teas.
I'm currently having a delicious and fragrant white tea pu'erh. Not the one shown here, this is only for illustrating a pu'erh cake, but close to that:
- whiteteapuerh.jpg (26.62 KiB) Viewed 1257 times
The tea is compressed into a 'cake'. This started a long time ago. At one point in time the Chinese got tired of being invaded by 'barbarians' on horses. So they thought about getting into horses themselves and looked to buy some. The Chinese were experts at making tea which the 'barbarians' did not have. So they used tea as money. And there went a caravan of people and mules carrying tea leaves on a great distance, to the 'barbarians' in order to get horses. And then they found that at the arrival the tea leaves were not very nice at all. So they optmiized the process by pressing the tea leaves into 'cakes' to make them easier to sustain the long travel times and still be very usable at the end. And so were born tea 'cakes', from the village of pu'erh and so they got the name of pu'erh tea. And since then the slow fermentation process that's still taking place inside those cakes became very valuable. Pu'erh cakes of high quality today can be worth quite a lot. Nevertheless, no need to aim for the riches as regular good quality teas provide a lot in taste and yield.
There are more details to all this, such as the destruction of a lot of pu'erh cakes during the 'cultural revolution' and the recent discovery of an alternate way to age pu'erh quickly (which gives a different taste and has a special name of being 'cooked' (shu))
And so, in practical terms about $150 USD (including SAL postage from China) gets close to a kilo of fresh tea of various types. A kilo is a lot of tea. Especially when each bunch of leaves can be steeped a lot of times. Scott also has a US distribution site which is neat for Americans, but not so much for other countries in which case ordering from China is best. The US site also doe snot have as much choice.
Of course, at $1 for 10 tea bags, one might wonder how it'd be possible to drink 1500 bags in a year
It is not the same range but, it's not that much more expensive all things considered. A 'session' of tea drinking might come up to 0.50 in leaves instead of 0.10, but that's for at least 5 small cups.
'Small cups' is another thing. No such thing as a mug of tea. A good amount of tea leaves are used in a small vessel as the one shown above (any ware can do, really) and the steep time is short. No way to be able to do dishes during that time
It's more like, brew tea for 60 seconds, then do the dishes while sipping tea. This gives a thick tea full of flavour and tea stuff. So pu'erh teas can thus be made to be very strong in 'boost' qualities, same with fresh green teas and others.
Coffee for a boost ? Nah. Tea ! The difference is also in the boost quality. With coffee the mind goes here and there and back again and then way over there: it becomes scattered. With that kind of teas, the boost is focused and lasts longer. No wonder buddhists used tea to concentrate their meditations. Nothing to be compared with tea bag teas sold in stores. And price-wise, nothing to compare with those fancy tea shops like David's tea, Teavana and such which are selling with an incredible profit margin teas that are not so good at all.
https://yunnansourcing.com/
https://yunnansourcing.us/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNNWGS8EmiQ
Cheers.
This reply was written under influence of tea