Friday 13 January 2012

looking back and forward


My journey into the world of tea started ca 2 years ago. As most of the people also I started with green tea, first Japanese than Chinese. Later I discovered the wide variety of oolongs, teas like tieguain and da hong pao made some nice wow moments. Puerh tea was ignored for a while until I ordered a cheap lao thong zhi from 2005 with some other teas. After a month I found myself to drink it more often than any other tea though looking back, it’s a “nothing special” sheng. I started to read about the puerh on the net, found some commonly trusted vendors and ordered samples. After a couple of months of sampling I started to buy full cakes and puerh became my number one tea.
Few months ago I received some yixing hongcha samples with one of my orders and after the first session I asked myself that how comes that I never tried this kind of tea? Generally the hongcha is relatively cheap in comparison with other teas (especially yancha) so maybe it was the tea snob in me who was assuming that it can not be that pleasant like the more expensive types of tea. I couldn’t be more wrong. A good hongcha is sweet, robust and often complex.
To make the long story short I drink mostly sheng pu, (both young and aged) and Chinese black tea. Besides the reasons I just mentioned, the fact that these teas have no shelf life makes them very attractive for me. I just don’t like the situation when a bag of green tea is opened and I have to drink it within 1-2 month otherwise it will go stale. BUT it doesn’t mean that I don’t drink green or oolong tea once upon the time. If you drink too much of puerh, you can get bored of it even if you try to be variable (different age, origin, factory…) and then a good long jing or ali shan can be a pretty nice refreshment.
As a PhD student I live alone here in Milano so the most of the evenings are about tea drinking and blog writing about it could be a nice addition. 

cheers

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