Tea Accessibility
In the west, Asian tea culture can be difficult to sift through without knowledge or experience. If you have a tea shop near you that serves tea in a gaiwan or Yixing chances then this is much easier. Many in the states don’t have this same access so they have to buy tea online. They are at the mercy of the advertising of the company rather than their own tastebuds. If you’ve never had a particular tea before, there’s a lot of gambling going on between price, information and quantity.
The past few years and 2014 in particular have been great and making tea and tea knowledge more accessible. There are countless websites, facebook groups, tea makers and sellers on social media who you can actually talk with and discuss the tea they have or know about! Of course the blogosphere is important too (you are reading this, in fact!) Blogs allow us to self-publish more involved stories and ideas in a more streamlined way than Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (all of which have their own merits.) The biggest advancement in 2014 tea accessibility is the number of tea clubs. It appears that almost every shop and website has their own version of a mail-order tea club.
Almost 1 year ago I singed up for two clubs Global Tea Hut and Jalam teas Puer club. With Jalam you get a 100g Bing of puer to your door for $20 a month! In a year your puer collection will be more than 1 kilo of tea! Rather than wading through pages and pages of puer with 50 different teas of various ages all from different mountains, One xiao bing is sent to your door to say “here, try this. now you know” Lots of varied flavors even from similar regions. They send Sheng and Shou both so If you are unsure which you like (or have never had one or the other or both) You will gain access to the world of puer. My favorites are Jingmai and He Kai so far. Each tea comes with a picture card (photos by the ever traveling Jeff Fuchs who wrote a great book on the tea horse road) with info about the tea on the back. The information is quite informative in terms of the culture. sometimes I wish there was Pinyin uniformity to tea info so as not to confuse future puer friends. If this is an introduction to the culture and people are expected to get excited about seeking out more tea than I think using more common terms to describe the tea would be helpful. Using sheng or raw rather than green unfermented would be ideal since the tea will change. Green unfermented implies that it will always be green and not ferment Raw and sheng only imply the production process. Not a big deal in the long run at all though, keep up the good work I can’t wait to tastes the next tea!
Around the same time last year I signed up for Global Tea Hut. After reading Wu De’s (Aaron Fisher) Book The Way of Tea, and Many issues of The Leaf, I decided It was time to subscribe to the “Hut”. For a sliding scale of $20 or more a month you get a magazine, a tea sample, and a tea/culture related gift! The teas are great with a good amount of variety from sheng and shou puer to Hong cha and oolong. The gifts are often practical things to augment your tea making experience, be it tea scoop, chabu or artwork. for me both the tea and the gift are a bonus and the real worth in the subscription is in the magazine. Each month there is a profile on the tea they send and often some historical info about the processing of similar teas. As the Hut is in the heart of Taiwan, the cultural writings are experienced first hand so you don’t have to sift through ‘fluff’ They know when and where the tea was processed and often have interviews with the people who made the tea! Sometimes that is the hardest thing to find in the west. Another interesting thing about the mag is the “wayfarer” section which profiles a member of GTH. They speak about everything from how they got into tea to experiences at the Hut or traveling tea lands. More than worth the price of admission considering the quality of the writing and the “behind the scenes” access to culture.
There are plenty of other clubs popping up which I may venture into this year. As I sit here drinking White2tea’s 2002 White Whale (arguably the most well known tea of 2014) Paul’s club is quite intriguing. I’ve seen lots of Instagram friends posting as well as what Paul posts and it looks like a fun selection of teas. If you’ve had on teas from W2T you’ll know he’s got some good stuff. I have only had a small amount of the teas but I was impressed (don’t worry Paul, I’ll be ordering something soon enough)
I encourage you to check out at least one of these subscriptions if you haven’t already. The value in your cup will speak for itself. As the bridge to the east becomes shorter and shorter it is more and more exciting to be a tea drinker!