I’m going to start writing about teas, mainly from West China Tea, because in the last year I managed to try something like 100 teas (not tea bags, real, whole leaf tea… since tea bags are graded as ‘tea dust’ and are denatured tea that have almost none of the benefits of real tea). Many of them were samples in 5 gram to 10 gram amounts from Teavivre, which is a very good company in China that sells hundreds of teas in what I would call the medium quality range. I have great respect for them. They try VERY hard with personal customer service and they give you reward points. They have excellent explanations of each tea including where it was grown and by whom, often with photos. They also have a huge selection of good teaware and I have quite a lot of it.
West China Tea in Austin, TX is actually a level up from Teavivre and is a VERY serious tea house you can go to and also they sell what I think are the best teas in the United States, imported from VERY high end locations in China and I will get into explaining why they are worth their increased cost over a more mass sales place like Teavivre. Both are great for different reasons.
This is a very complex, and I suppose very subjective subject to write about, but hey, I’m writing mainly for myself and I’m not trying to be objective or erudite or elitist or even hyper-knowledgable about this massive subject.
It’s too big of a subject for any one person…. We all just add a little bit of what we’ve learned. Sharing with compassion and hopefully some kind of karma will arise from use treating each other well and talking about something that isn’t the usual suffering and bad news in our world. Tea is good news. Tea is life. The families that make the tea are bonded to the land and we OWE them the honor of bearing witness to their enormous efforts to bring forth this miraculous substance from the earth in myriad forms. Over 3,000 real teas (variants of camellia sinensis) exist. White tea, Yellow tea, Green tea, Oolong tea, Red tea, Black tea, Puer tea. I certainly had NO idea that there were SEVEN major categories and then hundreds of sub-categories of one little leaf out there in nature.
That’s the mystery and the magic of tea. It’s a massive world of flavors and peoples across China (my focus) that almost nobody in the world really knows anything about. Learning about tea is learning about LIFE and people and culture and history and above all, the astounding variety of flavors you can experience in minutes if you choose to. It’s NOT what’s’ on your supermarket shelves. It’s BARELY related to that stuff.
You’ll just have to trust me and hopefully we can learn together as I continue to learn daily from the seemingly endless variety of teas that I am trying and often re-trying. One thing I’ve learned is that you never just try a tea once (or even several infusions) and then write it off. I’ve done that too many times and had to laugh at myself later when I realized that with just a little tweaking of my water temperature and how many seconds I infuse it for it tastes completely different.
I always give teas multiple chances for my palette because there are SO many variables and it’s not just the tea. It can be our own tastebuds being affected by many things.
It’s just an amazing thing. I became a tea fanatic about 20 years ago when I started buying ripe puer tea from PurePuer.com and that’s where this story begins….. Puer tea from Yunnan Province, from Larry and Yang Su Chin in California… it’s the ONLY tea I drank for about 20 years until 2023! And then my tea world exploded in a rainbow of new flavors.