shomer mitzvot- settling into my tea habits

5 adar 1 5782

i am starting to settle into my tea habits. i have gained a good sense of what i want to drink and when. ive also started to gain a sense of how i want my tea budget to look. both of these things are a couple of the main goals for me on this blog. i now know that too much sheng is rough on my stomach. this is especially true for younger shengs. i don’t want sheng to be a daily drinker for me (maybe an aged huangpian or something decent and affordable and aged that works well for cow drinking. when i first started my puer journey i was hoping to ride the wave of the shouletariate and to have shou be my go to daily drinker while saving my budget for more fancy teas to be reserved for the better quality aged sheng. this hope was momentarily derailed by an experience with a fancy shou wrecking my stomach. but after drinking a lot of tea, and then drinking some more tea, i am back on the road to settling into that goal and being happy with it. i will write a future post about the my beginning the journey into the exploration of shou.

this post will be reserved to discussing my current sheng habits.

with that bad shou experience, i went in search of an aged sheng as a daily drinker. as it turned out, these cheaper shengs were also not good on my stomach and just weren’t that enjoyable to drink. no luck for me there. sorry xiaguan and the crane gang…

so what are my drinking habits now? they align with a post cwyn wrote a while ago that i strongly resonated with. good tea is expensive. it doesn’t matter if it is sheng or oolong. the really good stuff is expensive and especially so the teas with good qi, and that good qi is what i am looking for. i do not have the budget to drink top tier aged sheng every day. but for now, i can treat myself to some good tea reserved for special occasions and to save for weekends or days when i have time to really sit down and enjoy it. so here i am. i own a little fancy sheng and i save it for the weekends.

because this is a tea i am plannig to spend appreciating, i need to know what i am looking for if i am investing time and money into wanting something nice to enjoy. this is the journey that i am on right now and is one that will continue for a long time. at this point in my tea drinking, for my fancy, more expensive sheng i am looking for a tea that…

1.  is good on my stomach. pretty simply here. i have a sensitive stomach and i don’t want to drink something that is going to mess with my day and take away my enjoyment from the tea i am drinking.

2.  has some good quality qi. i look for qi that is body centric and would gear towards feeling more relaxing, grounding, or centering. there are certainly days when i want some tea with a good punch and some ‘get up and go’ but i think that is fairly easy to find in the world of caffeinated leaves and i don’t have to drink fancy sheng to find that

3.  goes for many steeps. if i am drinking something that i spent a good chunk of money on, i want it to last. i want it to be a tea that i can drink throughout parts of my day. i am putting time aside to enjoy this tea so i expect that time to be well filled.

with this commitment to nice shengs on special days, i feel some of my fomo anxieties backing off. if i spend money on a fancy cake, i know it is something that i will have for a good amount of time. it is comforting to know i will have this nice thing to enjoy for a while instead of being fearful it will disappear.

another large part of my fomo with puer is that good puer is probably only going to get more expensive (unless the tea a bunch of speculators buys up becomes too much to save and it’s all off loaded at once…which would be great for puer drinkers). when i do buy nice puer in the future, even though it could be more expensive, i will know that i will have it for a long time and that i am not going to be spending that kind of money often.

this brings up another reason why i am very thankful to discord. a lot of these fancy teas and their sellers often times do not have samples available. at this point in my tea drinking, i am too scared to drop large amounts of money on a tea i haven’t tried. thankfully, discord is a great place to trade or buy sample size portions from people so one can have access to trying nicer puer without the commitment to blind buying a cake. 

it feels good to be settling into tea habits. this is my goal after all. to have a solid stash of tea i am happy to dig into and to feel no desire to buy more until i am running out. i am still in the phase of my tea life where i am ‘drinking around’ and dating multiple teas and multiple samples at once. i can say this has slowed in the world of aged sheng as i continue my search for a daily drinker (focusing on shou and aged oolong for this). that tale coming soon[ish] to a tea blog near you. 

xoxo,

atzei besamim