teakkurim

13 av 5781 i just had a big tea tasting with a friend for my first time. in the past i have poured tea for friends many times, but this time, we drank four teas. damnnnnnnn. they’ve had fancy tea before but not often and it was a while ago. they usually drink green tea. they like to needle me for being one of those tea snobs who doesn’t drink green tea, which i am (i just never happen to crave it. im also currently in a puer wormhole). i had a whole thing planned out. first, try this fancy green tea i traded for from a friend the other day. then, we would try a young sheng puer blend so we could compare green to puer. next was some 2019 autumn gushu. here we were really able to notice the difference in qi between all the teas. i intended to have our last to be a young spring gushu, but i asked if they wanted another young puer or something different like an aged puer. she wanted something different so i brewed us some 2011 yiwu stored in Taiwan. very different, very nice, l

7 av 5781 i have not posted in a while. it is summer, it's been nice, i've been outside running, jumpin, living life. today's it's rainy so i thought i'd post a lil bit. what have i been drinking? well, i tried again to see if i like young sheng. nope. cant do it. autumn, gu shu, whatever. not good on my stomach and i also just like aged sheng more. i will give a shout out to this very affordable cake from KTM . it has great stamina, good mellow qi, and really holds up. im guessing it would even age pretty well. otherwise, my summer teas has been the naked yiwu from TWL. im not in love with it, but it has been nice for outside sunny days. i've still been drinking aged sheng even though i assumed i wouldnt want to in the summer. but its the PNW so we get a lot of days that start off cloud before the sun comes out. not much to say. i have more things i plan to write about in the future, but hey, look at that, the sun's coming out. gotta go. xoxo, atzei besamim

30 sivan 5781 another good tea from the same reddit stranger . this is a 2003 custom 8582 (a classic menghai tea factory recipe but this one is made by a smaller company). i think it has some HK storage storage on it (dry/natural maybe?). it is also sold here but i got my cake from the stranger at a great price of $55 for the cake. is it an incredible tea? no. is it very good for the price? most certainly. it has that nice aged comforting taste and leans towards the malty grains profile and has a fairly thick tea broth.a lot of the flavor is coming from the storage but i do not mind that because i like hk dry storage. once it gets into the later steeps, it mostly just has that tea leaf taste without much else going on. the qi is nice but not super strong and it feels good on my stomach. it goes for a decent 10 brews which is good for this price and quality. it still has some bitterness to it so it has room to continue to improve. the term reddit stranger is inspired by this hilarious

28 sivan 5781 i finally had some very good tea. this cake, the 2013 xiaguan love forever (commissioned by the Taiwanese company Fei Tai, the same company you might recognize from other xiaguan productions like FT 8653, etc etc. the FT means Fei Tai) is well known and well written about in the western puer scene. my opinions on it do not offer any new insight or hot takes. wah wah. although it was pressed in 2013, it is made from aged maocha from 2003 (and rumor has it there may be some gushu in there... ooh ahh). i bought this from someone on reddit for $127, as mentioned in an earlier post , which is a very good price for this tea (it is listed on TWL for $147). this is a very good tea. it is very drinkable. i like it so much it is the only puer i have been drinking for the last few days. it has some good mouth cooling, good huigan, and great qi, the kind i really like where it feels heart centered, is calming, and helps me take good breaths. it also goes 12+ steeps which is pretty da

4 tamuz 5781 my friends came over last night and one of them is into tea and recently got some stuff from Enthea in PDX (my old roommate, who got me into gong fu cha, is friends with the owner) so we did a trade. i got a lil bit of some green tea and a dan cong. i don’t normally drink green tea but i wanted to use it as a comparison for a future tea sesh i want to do with another friend who likes green. in exchange i gave some 07 peacock yiwu blend form puerhjunky, a 2011 yiwu stored in Taiwan, and 2020 fujian white and some aged white from 2014. i wanted to hook them up.   this felt good. sharing tea with people and giving them some things that are normally pretty hard to get. up next, a tea tasting with the another friend as i continue to introduce them to puer. the first dose is always free… xoxo, atzei besamim