It’s been two and a half years since I moved to Taiwan, and I’ve been thinking about how it’s changed my relationship with tea. In California, I’d been a regular tea drinker for over a decade, but since moving here, my understanding of tea has deepened so much, and so quickly, that it’s hard to remember quite what it was like back then.
Thankfully, after about a year here, I made some notes on this very subject. I didn’t think much of it at the time, and kinda just forgot about them. But rediscovering these recently, it’s been interesting to reflect on how much my perspective has changed since.
Here are those notes, from July 2023:
One year in Taiwan
A few days ago was the one-year anniversary of our arrival in Taiwan. It got me thinking back on that time just before I arrived, and how my assumptions about tea in Taiwan have changed over the past year.
After so many years in a dry climate, I arrived with this idea that Taiwan-stored pu’er was by default going to have really good storage. Boy could I not have been more wrong. There is so much terribly-stored (too wet) old tea in Taiwan. Sifting through it is an enormous task. It’s given me a newfound respect for the vendors who put in the time to offer a well-curated selection. I also was confident that living in Taiwan would by default mean access to better prices. This has been true some of the time, but comes back to the issue of curation.
Upon arrival, I was thrilled to scour the tea shops of Taipei and beyond. But tea shops are tricky, because not only are you figuring out the shop owner and where their preferences lie, but they’re doing the same with you. It’s been common to walk into a shop and be offered a lot of really cheap tea, or poorly-stored tea. It can take time to convince them that you want something better. I think this is especially the case as a foreigner, where expectations are low.
I’ve occasionally found good deals at tea shops, but buying tea in person doesn’t always go quite the way you think it will. For instance, sometimes you try a tea in a shop and like it, then buy a cake and discover that the sample cake was stored very differently from the one you just bought. This happened to me with a 2005 Dayi 504-7542. I purchased one for 3600 NTD (around $110 USD), which struck me as a pretty decent price for a brick-and-mortar shop. I was pretty excited about it. But upon closer inspection back at home, the storage was far too wet, with a dominant geosmin note. Even after smelling the wrapped cake in the store, sometimes you can’t really tell until you get home. And sometimes not until you’ve actually brewed it yourself.
Something else I wasn’t prepared for, was how much fake tea you have to wade through. And just in general, how much tea you have to wade through. Much of it is really cheap, so you kinda know what you’re getting. But then there’s all the expensive stuff, and determining what’s actually worth the price can be challenging. Especially so with teas you’ve never heard of, and are being offered with the insistence they’re very good. There’s a lot of noise to filter out.
Probably the most consistently low-priced and easily sourced tea I’ve found has been through the Taiwan Facebook auctions. There are numerous risks here too, and I’ve had some pretty abysmal purchases. But it’s an easy place to buy tea when you have a Taiwan bank account and a local address— it’s at your door in 2-3 days. And not having to wait several weeks on shipping makes it easier to buy things more frequently.
Something that’s surprised me is that I’ve started drinking a lot more younger pu’er (around 10-12 years old), your typical Taiwan boutique gushu-style productions. My pu’er consumption in the past has usually been semi-aged teas in the 15-20 year age range. Much of it factory tea and stored more aggressively. But here, there’s a lot of interesting younger boutique teas that aren’t available in the West. At first I was resistant to this, considering them too young to drink. But I kept encountering them. I think a turning point was an early 2010s Chenyuan Hao from Bingdao that really impressed me. It had this interesting savory buttery profile in the mid-steeps, wonderful thickness, and very relaxing body feel. Over time I’ve found more and more that I enjoy these younger teas. And I’ve also met quite a few people here who like them. All of which has influenced my drinking and buying habits in ways I didn’t see coming.
Outside of pu’er, I’ve found myself drinking a lot more Taiwanese hongcha, mostly just casually, for instance around breakfast time. This is a holdover from my life in California, where I frequently started the day with Chinese hongcha, usually something like Dian Hong or Zhengshan Xiaozhong. In Taiwan, it’s harder to find Chinese hongcha, but there’s decent-to-good Taiwanese hongcha practically everywhere you look. Generally speaking, I find it to be a slightly different sensibility, and I didn’t like it as much before moving here— the Taiwanese ones tend to have larger unbroken leaves and brew lighter and sweeter, and sometimes more sour. They often lack the robust body of Chinese teas, but have an elegance I’ve increasingly come to appreciate.
I’ve also been drinking a fair amount of medium/heavy roast Taiwanese oolongs— Dong Ding, Muzha Tieguanyin, etc. Which hasn’t been that surprising as I’ve always liked these. Though I expected to be drinking a lot more once I got here, and that hasn’t really happened. Even though they’re everywhere and easy to acquire, my drinking habits have continued to be fairly pu’er-centric.
There of course have been many other benefits to living here. After so many years in the coffee-centric culture of Los Angeles, it warms the heart to have the daily reminders of tea culture’s prominence in Taiwan. There’s 5 or 6 tea shops within a 10 minute walk of my apartment, and I end up walking by such places near daily. Anytime I need something basic, like a cheap gaiwan, they’re everywhere. Recently I bought several for 150 NTD ($5 USD) a piece, and they get a lot of use. And I don’t think I’ll ever tire of knowing there are teahouses all around town, that I can head off to whenever I want to get out of the house. It’s an environment that is sadly lacking in the West, and I’m grateful to be in a place where it’s so normal.
Two years in Taiwan
I started writing this a few months ago, but now I guess it’s been more like two and a half years. Much of what I wrote after one year still rings true, though I think my understanding has gotten more nuanced since then. Perhaps the greatest change has been the growth of personal relationships— with other drinkers, tea shop owners, private collectors, tea experts/tea masters, etc. And this has in turn increased my access to good tea and tea-related information. Just in general, it’s become much more clear to me how much tea in Taiwan is about relationships.
In my first year in Taiwan, I was still pretty consumed with getting my bearings, and wasn’t getting out to drink with others as much as I wanted to. I’ve since settled into more of a routine and have been able to find more time to make connections with other local drinkers. It’s been especially valuable to drink with older Taiwanese pu’er enthusiasts, where I’ve seen that everyone has their own slightly different perspective. I’ve learned a lot from gaining an understanding of this spread of knowledge and beliefs. For instance, in the different ways people feel about modern processing styles, or about traditional storage. I’ve also become more aware of what the larger pu’er community looks like in Taiwan, and how it’s actually fairly small, and a lot of people know each other.
In the past year I’ve also gotten more interested in research, and taking a more studious approach to what I’m drinking. I’ve been digging into Chinese-language print literature around pu’er, which goes much further than what’s on the internet. It’s easier to do this from Taiwan of course, and I suspect I never would’ve ventured down certain paths without living here. In some cases, I’ve even been able to borrow books from the library.
And along these lines, my drinking habits have shifted in a way, towards a greater proportion of educational sessions— such as blind sessions to compare the same cake with different storages, or different batches from within a single year, or similar-age teas from a single region, etc. Whereas in the past, more of my sessions were just for comfort, as in, drinking whatever I felt like because it’s something I already knew and enjoyed. And while I do find the educational sessions valuable, my best sessions are still generally with the teas I already know well. There’s something meaningful in familiarity.
A pretty significant change over the past two years is that my tastes have gotten more expensive. This is in part due to that increased access to better teas, and to better prices for those teas, but also I think drinking with more experienced people pushes you this direction. I think it’s also just what happens when you want to go deeper. It has meant though, that some of my earliest purchases in Taiwan have been less desirable to return to. I’m not sure tuition ever really ends.
I’ve noticed that my tastes in factory teas have steadily moved towards Dayi and Menghai Tea Factory since living here. I’ve always liked a range of factory teas, Xiaguan and Dayi in particular, and still drink a fair amount of Xiaguan, especially the early 2000s productions, but proportionally am drinking a lot more Dayi these days. I think this is partially due to Dayi being cheaper here than what I was used to in the US, having access to a wider range of productions and storages, and having met a number of Dayi collectors. There’s also a sizable portion of the Taiwanese pu’er community that just significantly prefers the Dayi profile over other factories (many can be pretty disdainful towards Xiaguan, for instance).
I’ve also been drinking more and more older tea, like teas from the ’90s, ’80s, and older. Mostly shengpu and aged oolong. There’s so little of this in the West, and it’s also pretty hard to learn about. So it was surprising to see how much there was in Taiwan. At this point I probably take it for granted, but I’ve also gotten more discerning thanks to friends who’ve helped me better understand these teas.
My understanding of storage has also become more nuanced. I’m increasingly intolerant of really dry storage, but also my overall preference has just shifted towards more wet. And in particular I’ve become more open-minded about what I’d consider “bad storage.” There’s a lot of wetter-stored tea in Taiwan, and some of it really is too wet, like carelessly wet, to the point that there’s nothing left but storage notes (very different from carefully-controlled Hong Kong traditional storage). But there’s also a lot that’s somewhere straddling the line of “too wet” and might even air out pretty well if given the right environment and enough time. Which is a gamble, but I’ve gotten more comfortable taking these chances.
The way I think about my own home storage has also changed. It’s so much more hands-off. In California, I was constantly fighting dryness, dealing with boveda packs and the like. Here, I store my tea in natural conditions, in a closet that averages 73 F / 73 RH. No mylar or boveda or added heat. The cakes are packed in as tight as possible, and aside from one small mold incident last year, this setup has done really well.
I’ve learned that I can count on my storage to improve certain teas fairly quickly. In particular, teas that are initially too dry-stored, such as some Dayi or younger boutique cakes. If I leave such a cake in my storage for a few months, more often than not it’ll really open up and come to life. Develop more depth, a more active mouthfeel, better viscosity, lose some of its astringency and youthful uncomfortableness. And in some cases, especially with teas closer to 20yrs old, start to show hints of more age. It’s been a big shift in my thinking about storage.
And then there’s the cases where fairly strong wet storage notes have aired out really well after several months (or sometimes more like a year). With some of these, you wouldn’t even think they’d once had an overbearing storage note. Though it’s hardly a guarantee, and I can think of several cakes where this hasn’t gone the way I’d hoped (that Dayi 504-7542 comes to mind). But these experiences with overly-dry and overly-wet cakes have helped me better understand what good natural storage is capable of, and how I should think about cakes that might seem too dry or too wet.
My approach to buying tea has also changed. The temptation to go hunting in every tea shop has almost entirely subsided. Maybe I’ve just gotten jaded, but after a while, a lot of these places feel the same. And it takes time, effort, and money to figure out each one. And they might not have anything all that good, at least not for a good price. So aside from the few where I’ve built up relationships, I don’t bother much with tea shops these days. Instead I tend to buy from individuals— friends, private collectors, auction sellers, etc.
I’ve also become more targeted in my purchasing, and more willing to move quickly when an opportunity arises. In the past, I was very cautious about buying, and usually bought samples first. In Taiwan, you can rarely buy samples of pu’er, and often have to act fast, as sometimes there’s rather little and it won’t be around for long. Sometimes you can sample in a shop, but it’s just a single session, and with someone else’s brewing parameters. But with more rare and valuable cakes, breaking off samples isn’t realistic. So nowadays, I more often rely on knowing and trusting a seller, and oftentimes there’s no sampling beforehand. But I usually already know a fair amount about the tea in question, and whether it’s worth taking a chance on. After several missed opportunities with interesting teas, these are things I’ve just come to accept.
As far as teas outside of pu’er, I’ve cut down quite a bit on just about all of it, except for aged oolongs. Occasionally I’ll have young Tieguanyin or Dong Ding, or maybe some Taiwanese hongcha. But there’s only so much tea one can drink in a day, and more and more I just want to devote my time, and caffeine intake, to pu’er and other aged teas.
When I think back on life pre-Taiwan, I think I’d kind of reached a complacency with my tea drinking. It wasn’t really intentional, somehow it just felt like there wasn’t that much more to explore. I’d been drinking for a long time and had been through a lot of learning with pu’er already. Or at least I thought so at the time. I was pretty content to keep drinking the same teas day in and day out. Which, from my perspective now, was a pretty narrow range of teas. I really had no idea what I was in for when I arrived in Taiwan.
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