Hou De Fine Teas Reintroduction

Hou De Fine Teas (commonly shortened to “Houde” or “Hou De”) out of Huston Texas is one of the original puerh vendors in the West and has a very long and influential presence in the Western puerh scene.  This is apparent if you look back to the first years of The Half-Dipper And older forums.  The main reason for their influence is the fact they were the first and only vendor to sell in any significant quantity of boutique puerh from Taiwan (Yang Qing Hao and Xi Zhi Hao) to Western markets at a time way before Facebook auctions, Taobao, or Group buys.  Most puerh drinkers from this time had some of their first experiences of Taiwanese boutique puerh thanks to Hou De, including me.  They owned this field for over a decade and their influence is really undeniable.  In these days, they were the first to offer limited amounts of these puerh which created a bit of frenzy back then with cakes that were quick to sell out.  This is super interesting because they were basically the only direct connection to early puerh appreciation and culture that came right from the source- Taiwan whereas all the other early Western puerh vendors at the time were mainly based out of Kunming.

For me back then I was more interested in the old school puerh factories like Menghai Factory and Mengku Shuangjiang and even other higher quality factories that were emerging out of Mainland China at that time.  They were much cheaper than the boutique Taiwanese brands that were pretty much new and unproven and insanely expensive.  However, I did end up sampling a handful of Houde samples that were passed on to me by other Western puerh drinkers at that time.  This is how I had some of my first experiences with Taiwanese boutique puerh and some of those samples even madeit onto the blog back in the day.

For the last many years Houde has been pretty inactive- not bringing in much new puerh at all really.  Gwang of Houde says it’s because the price of the quality of puerh they sell is simply getting too expensive and there is not the market outside of mainland China for such high priced things.  Recently however they have been active again with more releases and posts on their blog!  They even released a limited quality (7 cakes) of 2006 Xi Zhi Hao Lao Ban Zhang Yin (aka Black Wrapper) which sold out in light speed emulating the classic limied sell outs of classic Houde!  Another super interesting thing they have been doing is starting to sell off their stock of early-mid 2000s puerh that has spent their entire time dry aging in Huston Texas.

For me there was enough interesting samples listed to justify a long overdue order from them.  Shipping out of the USA is terribly expensive for international puerh drinkers (Liquid Proust & Houde) and normally would be hard to justify for me.  I look forward to posting about my impressions here on the blog over the coming weeks…

It’s nice to see Houde up and running again…

Peace