buying decisions

Arshille Gorky - Aviation Evolutions of forms under aerodynamic limitations I (1935-1936)

i have come across this video from james. he points out two things that i would like to expand on.

first and foremost i want to expand a bit further on the topic of tea and money. similarly to james i pointed out at the end of my previous post about this topic that you probably will learn more studying 100g of one particular tea than 10 different 10g samples.

at the beginning people often start out by buying a whole range of different teas. they amass a huge range of samples, but chances are high that there is going to be a lot of shit tea in there. there will be some good teas in there as well, but will you as a beginner realise which one is which? could you accurately separate the wheat from the chaff? most likely not. don't get me wrong. it might be good to try the one or the other sample at the very beginning just to get a very basic feeling about what tea is and that there is something more than teabags out there. but once you figured out that you indeed like tea, your buying decisions should radically change. looking back i have actually made very few bad buying decisions thanks to some early community guidance and i am pretty happy with what i have at the moment. this is due to some very general guidelines which made my tea-buying-endeavour a lot more joyful. the guidelines are as such:

 

try different vendors 

this for me was the most important lesson i learned. i was of the opinion that yunnansourcing.com was the pinnacle of not only yunnan teas but all teas. usually tea shops have certain teas they specialize in - so this opinion was obviously stupid. just accepting one vendor as "the best" or "authentic" and not trying different sources is one of the worst pitfalls of the early tea hobbyist. some might get stuck in here forever. every tea vendor has a bias through which they select their offerings. some vendors have a very characteristic "house style". some are straight up frauds. you more likely going to notice those things once you diversify your tea orders across different vendors.

buy less - buy better

once in the rabbit hole the early tea adventurer tends to amass a lot of tea. i have talked about this in my above mentioned previous post "on value". this has really made me much more happy when looking at my tea collection.

but now you say - "i'm a beginner, how do i recognize good tea?"
and i would say - "well, by drinking good tea"
and you would say - "well but how can i drink good tea without knowing which one of my teas are good?"
and i would answer - ...

... listen to respected people that have experience 

at the beginning it seems like there is just no way around this. don't blindly listen to any one person though. you need to listen to a community (forum, discord, blogs, ...) and see who is credible and who is not. the loudest are not always the most knowledgable. however even if someone seems credible, you always should read or listen to them with a grain of salt and spot their biases and personal preferences. do this without being disrespectful or doubting them unnecessarily since they most likely know much more than you. maintain a respectful distance, see what makes sense and gather knowledge. you will inevitably buy some shit tea. don't get discouraged. it really is bound to happen and can be a very valuable learning experience. however if you judge the characters and their knowledge right, you will end up with some pretty good tea. keep in mind that if you are new they won't tell you about all the best sources. good tea is rare and sources are well protected, as they should be. but there really is no need to aim for the best right away.

plan your buying decisions

later, once you get the feel for it - once you start to recognize good tea and know more about your preferences, plan out your buying decisions. it is very easy to succumb to fomo (fear of missing out) or to let your curiosity get the better of you and just buy at every opportunity you get. think about what you want, where you want your collection to be and budget accordingly. think of it as a hunt. the exciting part about hunting usually only happens in a very limited timeframe. most of the time you are just waiting. be patient. wait for the right moment. catch the prey.

 

the second thing raised by james in the video is, that a lot of people fall in love about different ideas around tea, rather than the tea itself. i have written about this previously and don't want to sound like a broken record. however it is really those ideas and preconceptions that can just lead you down the totally wrong path. don't get ecompassed by any one idea early on. you don't know which ideas are the useful ones and which aren't. listen, learn ... drink a shit ton of tea ... then judge. if you drink a shit ton of good tea - the judging part will resolve itself.

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Image: Pedro Ribeiro Simões from Lisboa, Portugal, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons