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What a Puerh Lover Learns from a Fruitcake
This year I decided to bake a fruitcake. I have made fruitcakes before, and even have a recipe I developed back in my vegan days using beans. For this year’s fruitcake, however, I wanted to make a...
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Letter to a Prioress
Here is a letter I wrote to a long time nun friend. I have not written to her in some years. When I decided to write her again today, I looked her up to see where to send the letter, and found she was...
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Blind Sample Greek Puerh Tasting via Yunnan Sourcing
In November 2017, I was invited by Matt of mattchasblog to do a blind tasting of Yunnan Sourcing samples, in the manner of the old Half-Dipper blog posts where the samples are marked with Greek letters...
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When Tea Gets Ugly, and other 2018 Puerh Predictions.
The online tea world just gets nastier every year. I look back to a couple of years ago and the conflicts in the puerh world seem warm and fuzzy by comparison to what is going on lately. We are well...
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2017 Mansong New Company Yiwu Mountain Tea
YiwuMountainTea sample packsI received some unsolicited samples from a new company in Yunnan called Yiwu Mountain Tea. The owner emailed asking if I wanted some samples (no, not really) but then I got...
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3 Reasons to Make Shou at Home
Long time readers of this blog may remember the batch of shou I made back in 2015. Hard to believe three years have passed since I finished that shou. Over the first year I continued to taste the tea...
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Two Blogger Samples: 2003 Pink Dayi and 2006 Taetea 7452
This past week I set myself the task of trying two teas sent to me from bloggers. I have had these samples for some time, and perhaps the bloggers told me not to write about them and I am forgetting...
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Sup at Yunnan Sourcing
Some days of the week I feel like drinking a gallon of puerh and usually my craving comes after the medications, and the Rolaids following the medications, a time when I cannot dump my favorite...
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2006 Guoyan Lao Ban Zhang
2006 Guoyan LBZRecently I purchased Wilson’s 2006 Guoyan LBZ, a tea I might have missed entirely but for a heads-up from another collector. This tea is stored in Malaysia under a brilliant strategy and...
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Puerh Man
An old lady woke at 2 a.m. and turned over to stretch her aching hip. Some dream about a flooded kitchen and trying to get to the bathroom. The reason for the dream, she had to go, and padded to the...
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Questions I get asked about Puerh Storage
Big old crock.Over the past few years I have received quite a few emails about tea storage, usually a few every month. Most of the questions boil down to one of two possibilities, “is this storage...
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wtf is this??
2014 Huang Pian tea drugs.I used a red clay Chaozhou to boil my water,so my brew is a little more reddish.Wtf is this?? I am drinking white2tea’s 2014 Huang Pian from their Basics set. I own a couple...
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$1000 Teforia Wedding
New Teforia with 1960s Mushroom lampThe toughest thing about giving up coffee in the morning for me was the convenience of a coffee machine, of pushing a button and pouring a ready-made pot in ten...
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The Final Fantasy of Buying Puerh
This spring we confront our realities with an armored wallet. While the puerh harvest ahead appears bountiful, according to early reports, prices are headed nowhere but up. I have viewed some pre-order...
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Three Vendors you probably never heard of
How lucky we tea fiends are these days with all the possible vendors servicing our fix. We need every single vendor because each week we see another article online telling the world about how hot puerh...
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Steaming Apart a Puerh Beeng
When a machine compressed puerh tea is too tight for a knife or pick, I risk injury to my fingers and hands. A pair of pliers will break off chunks, but this breaks the tea leaves too, and sometimes I...
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Why Don't People Understand Puerh Fermentation?
The so-called “mystery” of puerh fermentation keeps cropping up on forums. Why do people not understand how vegetable plant matter is fermented? Fermented foods are basic farm science, not rocket...
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2015 Quanjihao Manzhuan Cha Gao
2015 Quanjihao Manzuan Cha gao Cha gao paste is often viewed as the Nescafe or Sanka of puerh tea. Meant as a portable form of puerh, all you need is a bit of boiling water and you can have your puerh...
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2018 The Bitter End (a Tea)
2018 The Bitter End beeng, and loose leaf high gradeThis year our weather morphed from winter into hot summer within four weeks. I took this photo in mid-April before shoveling out of this snowstorm. I...
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Puer Aeterna, Naka in 2018
2018 Naka tea ball from Bitterleaf TeasI feel hesitant writing about Naka puerh now. Back in the early days of my blog I wrote about white2tea’s 2005 Naka white label tea, and that post has followed me...
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