teakkurim

30 sivan 5781 another good tea from the same reddit stranger (mrmopar). 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?). a similar tea is sold here (same tea? different storage? idk) 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 ...

28 sivan 5781 i finally had some very good tea. this cake, the 2013 xiaguan love forever (commissioned for Taiwan, the same thing you might recognize from other xiaguan productions like FT 8653, etc etc. the FT means Fei Tai/For Taiwan) 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 darn good. plus...

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  

s ivan 7 5781 just the other day was shavuote, the jewish festival of weeks, one of the three pilgrimage holidays. this holiday celebrates the barley harvest. the barley was planted at the end of Passover and now it is ready to reap. a common teaching is to talk about the transformation of seed to plant and concurrently the transformation of wheat into bread (lots of metaphors there since this is also the day that, mythically, the torah was revealed to the Israelites at mt sinai. transformation for this collection of wanderers into a nation and the transformation of information into mature knowledge which the study of torah is supposed to encourage).   this is similarly the time when spring puer is being picked, processed, and pressed. there are definitely some nice connections to be made in terms of thinking about the transformation of raw leaf into tea and the transformation of puer overtime as it ages and evolves.   shavuote is about celebrating, appreciating, and learning....

sivan 4 5781   it has been unreasonably gorgeous this past week. sunshine, temperatures in the 70s, and flowers, flowers, flowers everywhere. when it gets like this i get invigorated by the sun. i wake up with energy and with that energy comes lots of anxiety. this is when i start chugging the downer herbal teas (mixes of chamomile, lemon balm, lavender, etc etc). i already feel naturally animated and i don’t crave caffeine let alone want it to fuel any anxious energy. all this to say that i have barely been drinking tea these days. when i do, i am casually brewing some loose leaves in a cup and i am not sitting down for a gong fu session of puer.    this is the time of the year where i try to spend as much time outside as possible. i have less desire to drink tea and when i do, i am looking for something that is not super stimulating, and doesnt require lots of precision.   i have dipped back into trying young unaged puer to see how i like it. since i don’t need a l...

iyar 29 5781   i finally felt good about paying a chunk of money for puer. usually i feel constant economic and political dread when participating in capitalism; especially when buying something that comes from super far away). but this time, my purchase finally aligned with my values. i bought tea from a stranger on reddit (aka: mrmopar).   why does this make me so happy you ask? this is who i want to give my money to- someone who is doing this out of the joy of their heart. they are not running a business. they are not trying to meet certain margin goals. they are someone who enjoys helping fellow western puer fiends have access to good, hard to get puer, at a good price. it’s like that friend of yours who would sell you weed at the buddy rate because they were only dealing to cover their own cost of smoking.   from this person’s reddit posts i could tell i liked their style, i liked their taste preferences, and i also liked the content of what they would post. addition...

15 iyar 5781   is it even worth it? spending all this time and all this money on drinking tea. not just the cost of drinking through loads of tea to find what i like, but then dropping dough on good tea which can be quite expensive. is it worth all the stress and hunting and agonizing? is it worth the time and money put into the space and special conditions required to store puer. i need a container, and a hygrometer, and some boveda packs and i need to check on the tea like it’s a finicky house plant. and and and…   i am seriously asking. this is not rhetorical. does the amount of enjoyment i get out of drinking puer outweigh all the stress? why cant i be happy with drinking some pretty good affordable tea and smoking good weed? no need for $200 cakes with great qi. top shelf weed has great bang for your buck where i live compared to top shelf tea. bam, here’s some qi for you.   i am writing these all as questions because these are things i am still asking myself. i am s...

9 iyar 5781   to clarify. this is about 2 pricey teas, which doesn’t necessarily mean it is fancy or even above average. this is my first time drinking an expensive puer. im trying not too let any expectations affect this. i only bought a sample, so if it’s just good and not great, im not gonna feel bad about spending the money.   it is from YS who i don’t tend to buy from, but i wanted some decent shou quick so i ordered from their US warehouse and threw on a couple samples.  '   fancy sample number 1: 2003 changtai brown label jingu wild material. this cake costs $300, whoah. so how does it taste? this is definitely a good quality tea but is it $300 good? dry clean storage. a little cooling on roof of mouth. taste lingers a lil bit. have to do short steeps or it can be bitter. brews for 12+ rounds. it is smooth, but not thick or luxurious. lots of stimulating energy and a lil expansive which is nice. i prefer teas that are more calming. so yes, it is a good tea bu...

1 iyar 5781 it is rosh chodesh iyar (the first of the month of iyar). iyar is known for being a month of healing because of the proliferation of herbs that are coming up during this time. the famous sage reb nachman said 'iyar' is an aconym for a phrase form the torah talking about the healing powers present in the world (not trynna get preachy). in honor of iyar, i want to make this post about healing. i try to think of tea as medicine in my life. i try to think of weed in the same way as well as other plants and herbs. yes, tea is a drug, but there is a fine line between drug and medicine (my non-professional opinion is that the difference lies in dosage but that is still a pretty lame definition).    this is something that is especially true during the winter months. i get depressed in the winter. it is the lack of sunlight, the cold, and the more time spent indoors. on a very basic level, my energy goes way down in the winter and it is harder to motivate myself to even do ...

26 nisan 5781  passover ended a few days ago so i thought it would be nice to celebrate one of the new years with something beautiful like the fruit blossoms that are out right now. the LP hook up i got and wrote about mostly gave me duds. but as i said, i am not going to complain because it was a lot of tea for not a lot of money . the one tea that stood out as my favorite by far was labeled '90’s jincha'. if i may quote a fantastic pop song ‘you’re from the 70’s but i’m a nineties bitch.’ which both this tea and myself are.    it tasted old. it tasted like someone who has never used a computer let alone the internet. it tastes like a beautiful antique wooden armoire in your grandparents house. it tasted like some old library in a small town that is full of worn down wooden tables. it tastes musty, but it's that good  musty. all of these things i love.   the tea did not go for many steeps, but oh well (factory tea?). there was some nice qi that was cente...

6 nisan 5781 as i have written about previously, i have a lot of dietary restrictions. bummer. food was a big part of my life. it was my career, it was what inspired me, it was a way that i expressed myself, and it was a way for me to connect to nature and other people. food still is all this for me, but it is something that also brings me a lot of stress these days.   i still love cooking and i  really  love cooking for others, but eating is the hard part. there are only certain foods i can eat and, especially during the winter, what i  can  eat is rarely what i  want  to eat.    that is why tea is so wonderful to me. here is something that maps very well onto the things i love about cooking. like food, tea is richly tied to years of culture including how it is continuing to evolve. similar to how i love the fun and hands on involvement of cooking, i love the act of pouring tea. i also love the aspect of sharing and hospitality that comes wi...

1 nisan 5781 the past couple of weeks my stomach has not been feeling well. it was feeling bloated and i had lots of cramping. there were a couple of days where it was hard for me to eat or drink because my stomach felt so upset. i had no idea what was going on.   i have a lot of health problems and it becomes extra stressful when something is happening in addition to my usual level of discomfort/pain. was it because i had missed a few days of one med that is supposed to prevent the side affects of another med that can cause upset stomachs? was it because i took an NSAID one day for when my body hurt more than normal and the cumulative years of NSAIDs were fucking up my stomach? was it because i had a younger puer and it was too harsh on my body? there’s so many variables it gets hard to figure out what is going on.   after two weeks, my stomach got a little better but not back to my regular level of meh. could it be the puer? i haven’t been drinking anything that young, but i...

24 adar 5781 recently, cwyn wrote a very poignant and well written post on her blog. this post brought out all my personal puer anxieties . cwyn's post is emphasizing that drinking the best puer you can should be your ideal goal. she gave a $200 minimum as a rough estimate for the cost for this category of excellent tea. $200 (the exact number isn’t what’s important) for tea is a lot of money for my income. she also emphasizes that puer is only going to get more expensive (especially because of climate change and how that affects yields). i don’t disagree with her and that’s what stresses me out.   i approach everything through a political lens. i am a political person. me and cwyn come from different places. she is retired after a long successful career. she is using her retirement and the money she’s saved to drink very good tea. i do not have a lot of money and who knows what social security will look like when i retire…   i think about everything in my life in terms of a...

22 adar 5781   i had another 7542 and it was worlds different than the last ones i had . it is all because of storage. the previous ones were aged in Kunming and stored in a very dry environment in the states. this one was ‘dry’ (aka: naturally) stored in hong kong. this one was bitter and had more bite, 2012 is fairly young, and although the PuerhShop 7542’s were lacking in flavor and texture, they were not as bitter because they were older.  the flavor i was getting from the 2012 was very different from the PS ones. this one was on the side of dark, plummy, some coffee tastes vs the PS one was grassier and very minerally.  the 2012 one was also a bit more stimulating. it didn’t give many quality infusions but that may also be a byproduct of its young age i am guessing. these statements are not groundbreaking or earth shattering for me. if you drink puer or read about it, these are some pretty standard statements. so why am i even writing about it? im one of th...