It Happened to me: A Puerh Drinker’s Worst Nightmare!!!

Warning the following content is graphic to drinkers of raw aged sheng puerh…

It happened to me and (this is your warning), it can happen to you…

I just happen to drink through a few cakes of approximately 10 years aged puerh, no big deal.  I’ll just go downstairs into my infinitely large stash of puerh a grab a few more cakes.  The stash is so big that it will probably last forever so really I don’t tend to check on it very closely.  I really don’t drink THAT much puerh anyways.  Half asleep, I creek down the 100 year old steps into the basement and into a rather unattended corner of my very unorganized basement.  I make my way into the corner littered haphazardly with cardboard boxes and Rubbermaid storage containers some unopened since moving from Korea or Victoria or place to place so many times.  I dig into a box that is littered with old dried bamambo tong wrappers and other tong boxes.  I pull back the bamboo and pull out a cake- wait a minute… is this the last cake in the tong? …. I can’t drink up this last cake.   It’s taste, smell, and feel bring back to a time and place I love.  Only one left!  Well I have many more tongs of different sheng puerh so I guess I’ll just grab another… only 3 cakes left in that tong… only 2 left in that tong… and a few other loose cakes… THAT’S IT!  All of a sudden, in that moment, I realized one of the worst nightmares of puerh drinkers has in fact come true.

It turns out that my stash wasn’t that big after all.  At its peak in 2012 it was at around 45 cakes, I think.  Now, I am left with around 15.  It turns out that it won’t actually last forever and it turns out that I do, infact, drink lots of aged puerh.  Over the last few years I have been drinking more and more puerh and less of other teas.  This is mainly due to the fact that many of the cakes I purchased approximately 10 years ago are now ready to drink and I feel that they are the healthiest option as well has the most enjoyable of teas.  I have quite a taste for adolescent sheng puerh- when it becomes quite easy on the digestive system but retains the vigor of its youth.  I love this stage, the qi, the taste, the aroma.  If I continue drinking as much as I do the whole stash will be completely gone in a year or two including some cakes from the 70s and 90s!

That’s right hoarding puerh drinkers, at some point you too may drink through your stash.

So this is where I am right now…

Peace

 

Hanging In My Office At Work

It seems appropriate considering odds are that the tea in my cup comes from one of these "12 Famous Tea Mountains of Xishuangbanna"!

Although the puerh tea featured in the past on this blog doesn't really represent the actual puerh I'm drinking, almost all of the tea featured in this blog has come from this area (a true representation of the cakes I have).

No wonder the label Xishuangbanna covers almost all the puerh tea featured here on MattCha's Blog.

Peace

The "NEW" MattCha's Blog Is A Puerh Blog!!! Ok?

Well my favourite tea is raw puerh cha of course!

It has always been (since well before the start of this blog at least).  All my tea friends and all the tea people I have ever been close to enjoy raw puerh much more than any other kind of tea.  I wonder what your favourite tea is?

When looking back at the posts on this blog the puerh posts are really overshadowed by the heavy Korean tea content.  In reality, I have drank much more puerh tea than Korean but you would probably never know it from reading this blog.  When going back through the blog I realized that I published more on samples and group tastings than my own purchases!  I guess I drink a lot of tea and you can't publish on everything else you would be posting daily and that's no fun at all!

The future of this blog will be puerh focused.  I hope to post more on what I buy, issues of puerh drinkers, and other original insights on puerh tea.  Don't worry, I will still post about Korean tea as well.  Since being out of the epicentre of Korean tea for so long, it seems natural to focus more on what I'm doing now and not as much what is going on thousands of miles away in Korea.

One of the first things I did to mark the shift to a puerh blog was go back to all the old puerh posts and tidy up the labels to reflect the vendor, factory, area, and town/mountain of the puerh.  Then I realized that the new mobile/ tablet version of Blogger doesn't even use these anymore.  You have to go to "view web version" to see them.  Does anyone even use labels anymore?

Anyhow.. So the upcoming posts are going to feature mainly puerh ... yay!

Peace

MattCha's Blog's Many Accomplishments... Horay!

The Old MattCha's Blog was started at a time with very little English knowledge about:

1- Korean tea history and written classics

2- the various types of Korean teas and their production

3- where to purchase Korean teas

4- Korean teawear

English information on Korean tea history and classics was changed dramatically in 2007 with Brother Anthony's book Korean Way of Tea, it was further advanced in 2011 with the publication of Korean Tea Classics, and new and important insights were added in 2012 with the publication in Transactions by Brother Anthony and Steven Owyoung.  The readers of MattCha's Blog held a book club on Korean Tea Classics to celebrate this introduction of knowledge!

Korean green teas and other types of Korean teas are featured throughout this blog and the production is outlined here.

An extensive list of Korean tea vendors is published on MattCha's Blog (I better update this).

Korean teawear is also featured throughout and can be viewed with this label here.

Overall, MattCha's Blog gives a complete picture of Korean tea culture.

However, as is popular in Korea, the blog also features many posts on other teas.  This is especially true of raw puerh from Yunnan, and Japanese matcha.

Many people are very surprised when they ask me what my favorite tea is... (any guesses?)...

Peace

Goals of Old Blog Accomplished!

I remember reading some of the exciting tea blogs coming out in 2006 and 2007 and wondering why nothing was ever mentioned about Korean tea?  I wondered why there were no posts about Korea's delicious teas and there were no beautiful Korean tea wears to be found.  I remember thinking that everything in English (and in Korean too) about the topic of Korean tea did not seem genuine or simply was not true to what was acutually going on outside of the capital city Seoul.  I felt that there was nothing that could accurately represent Korean tea culture.  So as a response to this I created MattCha's Blog.

Deep into the study of Seon (Zen) Buddhism, I remember choosing the colour of the blog to be the same grey colour as the Seon Buddhist clothes.  I wanted the blog to be about the tea, not about me, so the text would be the same green colour as tea leaves.  I remember that I deliberately chose to have the blog to be very simple and technologically modest in look and feel, mirroring the teachings.  The blogs name is an old play on words which reflects the above philosophy with my name (Matt) and a common type of tea (matcha).

The old MattCha's Blog, I feel accomplieshes all of these goals and addresses all of these concerns.  

MattCha: Can A Modest Ol' Tea Blog Make A Comeback?

I think so... I mean. I am still am passionate about tea!

Or is blogging a dying art?  Maybe not the best way to communicate to the tea world, maybe not as relevant as the powerful tea blog once was?

I think all of us tea bloggers out there discovered something about blogging, it is actually very time consuming!  I think that's why it is such a nice platform to communicate about tea- it's (relatively speaking) slower than other online methods.  It's a process. It takes time.

So is a good gong fu session...

I think us old school tea bloggers that once had lots of time in our 20s/early 30s to passionately pour our time into teaism, have lost that time to significant others, kids of our own, and demanding careers. There is only a certain amount of time in a day and surely those mentioned above are worthy of it!

It doesn't mean that we are still not passionate about drinking tea, I think we still are.... but we may have less time to really bask in a good tea session.  No matter what's in a day, my tea session is a moment of peace, a pause, some space in my day.  No matter how short it is, or cramped in between patients, or with my daughter tugging at my pant legs, it still brings me back into the moment.

I think others, too will come back to tea blogging as well.  It's like a middle age tea blogging crisis!

I read BearsBears blog a few months back and it kind of sums it up this feeling.

Peace