A Tea Addict's Journal

So about those choices

November 22, 2014 · 4 Comments

Well, when buying things there’s never a real “correct” answer. There is always someone who’s willing to buy a beachfront property in Kansas. The first thing you might notice about those choices is that they are largely anonymous – the stuff on the left side are mostly cooked puerh, and the right side are raw. The cooked pu are mostly CNNP wrappers, which doesn’t tell you much of anything. The stuff on the right are named, but only just – they are anonymous named tea cakes, in the sense that nobody would’ve heard of them anyhow. The green big tree you see half of is not the real deal, so it’s more or less the same as a CNNP wrapper.

The prices seem good – quoted in HKD, they are from about 180 to 500, with the 500 actually a cooked cake. The thing is, while these are sort of cheap (for this day and age), they are terrible value. The tea is likely to be bad – of the “this is awful” category. I tried a few of these while looking over these, just for the fun of it, and wouldn’t choose any of them, at any price. The rest – well, if the samples I tried are no good, chances are the others aren’t gems either.

To be honest though, I didn’t need to try to know that these were going to be bad. A few friends have commented to me privately after I posted this photo, basically saying “uh, these are all terrible”. If there’s anything like a general rule, it is that anonymous CNNP wrapper teas are going to be bad – you may find one out of a hundred that’s decent. The rest are just, well, horrible teas that were made in the dog days of the puerh industry, and ever since.

No-name brands like the ones on the right are no better. They are, 99% of the time, bad teas that are no good for aging. Some may be ok for current consumption, if it’s cheap enough and you’re not picky enough. The days of when no-name brand could be decent tea is behind us now – in the early to mid 2000s that may have been possible, because there were so many new outfits that were making tea. Now, however, it is most likely just trash tea that will age into nothingness.

Vendor choices, or lackthereof, is really a problem with buying tea. It is possible to choose a “best” tea within a given selection, yes, so even in this heap of what is basically no good tea, there will be one that seems better than others. It does not, however, mean it is a good idea to buy it – best among a bunch of junk is still junk. Within the online world, it is harder to make that judgement. I think a good way to try though, is to compare across vendors as much as possible. Even then, as I’ve said before, what’s available online is only a small fraction of total teas available in the real world, and much of the best teas never even leave the confines of China simply because the market demand for them is the highest there. The prices that online buyers will be willing to bear is simply not high enough for vendors to realistically bring the best goods to them. So, the pool of available choices are already poisoned, so to speak. Sometimes saying no is the best choice.

Categories: Teas
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4 responses so far ↓

  • Darius Wilkins // November 22, 2014 at 7:00 pm | Reply

    Ah, thought the HK$500 one was the HK Henry cake…

  • Von Monstro // November 24, 2014 at 2:17 am | Reply

    “Even then, as I’ve said before, what’s available online is only a small…”

    All that is a solemn reality I realized a while ago now. There’s a lifetime of work for me to do if I’m really to maximize my tea experiences. I love that tea is a niche, and therefore relatively (only relatively) unpolluted, but it comes at a price.

    I’ve come to terms with my chances of trying really great teas being slim. I’ll continue drinking teas that are merely okay to a palate free to experience many more teas. In a way, I suppose it’s better in the sense that I am free to enjoy what tea I can and not crave something far better and probably far harder to obtain. There are a few rough gems out there in the online market as well, as I’ve discovered, so not all is lost, but I definitely lust for the kind of experiences someone like you have been able to have with the connection to China. Who knows though; I’ve always been the slow but deliberate type. Perhaps in the future I’ll have the discipline and security.

    Tea is life.

  • hster // November 26, 2014 at 12:19 am | Reply

    Is it really awful? I’m totally not fazed by cheap mediocre aged tea- in fact I’ve developed a taste for it. These actually could be better than what we get in the west…

    H

  • vk // December 8, 2014 at 8:10 am | Reply

    I am at 100% the same situation, but I prefer red tea now 🙂

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