Green, Sencha okumidori
some random Chinese oolong
White, bai hao yin zhen
Edit: The oolong was pretty good. Mildly floral and fruity. The okumidori was just as good as I expected. Worth the price IMO.
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There’s a tea shop run by an eccentric woman from China a few towns over from me. She closes the shop sometimes for weeks or a month at the time when she travels back to China to vet new growers and suppliers.
Her selection is incredible, her knowledge beyond compare, she seemingly cannot stop talking for more than 30 seconds without suffering physical harm and her prices very fair.
I’ll stop by a few times a year and spend a similar amount there. The oolong she gets is just stellar. Long, unbroken leaves that I can steep 6 times and still get great flavor. The jasmine pearls she sells are the most floral I’ve ever had and every time I brew them I’m surprised.
Life is short. It’s worth spending a little, if we can, on good experiences to fill our days and share with others.
This is the way. If you’re lucky enough to have this lady in your neighborhood…
Sure. I mean it can be. You climb the price-value curve as high as you sustainably can, I guess everybody does it.
And eventually you find a plateau where you pay a whole lot more, but the experience gets only slightly better.
it’s normal if you are going to drink it.
if you just bought expensive tea just to buy it and post it here to brag you have 90 to spend on tea… well maybe not.
LOL. They will be gone sooner than I imagine.
I ran out of good tea a while ago, but I didn’t have access to higher quality teas, because I live in a small town. I just went with some generic regular sencha I could find in my local supermarket so that I’ll have at least something reasonably good to drink. Now that I’m visiting a bigger town with better selection, I decided to buy something nicer. Hence, the 3 bags.
BTW I’ve tried fancy coffee too, and 90 € disappears surprisingly fast. I think these three bags won’t last forever, but they do last significantly longer than the same amount spent on good coffee.
Are you aware of Teepolku? It’s another Finnish tea shop, that sells quality loose-leaf tea. They also have a webshop.
Oh, that’s a new one. Haven’t been there yet. Should probably check it out at some point.
I have bought tea from them for a few years now. The majority of their tea is unscented and some traditionally scented teas. Their teas are from different Asian countries, but I think most are from China and Japan. They also have Tea Club for €19 per month, which gets you 2 packs of tea (80 g total) of either light, dark or a mix of light and dark and a live YouTube tasting session/video. And for the past three years, they have also had a tea Christmas calendar, which has about 5g tea each day plus a daily live YouTube tasting session/video.
Oh wow! Sounds like a great place. I better set a reminder… 6 months from now? Well eventually, I’ll run out of tea and I need to go shopping again. In the meanwhile, that link will have to be stored in raindrop.
Thehuone in Helsinki is another good one which I am sure you are aware of (they also have a webshop). They have some good quality Jasmin tea which I always buy when I cross that. These theas are from The Ounce no? (Based on the bags and the handwriting)
Correct. The Ounce is one of my favourite tea places. Thehuone has a great selection of gaiwans and other hardware, if I recall. I think that’s the place where I bought my fancy tea bottle for travel purposes.
I drink black tea from Walmart, so not normal for me.
I’ll show myself out.
Nah, it’s ok, as long as you enjoy your tea.
Buying in bulk always makes sense. Tea is as essential as toilet paper.
I like to look at it like this:
How many cups will you brew with this?
And how much would it cost to buy that many (inferior) beverages from your nearest cheap cafe franchise thingie? (If we were both in Canada, I would say Tim Hortons, but I don’t know if those exist in Europe.)
This comparison likely makes your 90€ look like a sweet deal.
Edit: I did a quick math for example. If you use 2g per cup (from the total weight mentioned in another comment) that’s 271 cups. 271 cups of (shitty) tea from Tim Hortons would be $593.49 CAD, or about 367 €.
Incidentally, I’ve also taken a deep dive into the world of specialty coffee. I’ve come to the conclusion, that if I want to drink something delightful, coffee will end up being about 5 times more expensive (as in €/l).
I know it’s not a fair comparison, since the experience is vastly different, but if you look at the numbers, that’s what you’ll get. This means that if you spend the same amount on good coffee and good tea, and drink the same volume of both every day, you’ll run out of coffee long before you’re even half way through your tea stockpile. In reality though, I wouldn’t drink a liter of coffee, but I certainly can drink a liter of tea every day. The difference in expenses is significant anyway.
However, if you think about café pricing, that’s a whole different ballgame. You aren’t just paying for the beverage. If you think about it that way, you can definitely drink really expensive specialty coffee at home, and it’s still going to be cheaper. If you switch to tea, the difference gets even bigger. A single cup of Lipton at a café will cost you about as much as a 60 g bag of decent supermarket sencha. Drink that at home and you’ll have enough for several weeks.
I haven’t done such a deep dive, but I have noticed specialty coffee can get real expensive. There’s a local roaster who sells some really good beans, but it’s the sort of thing I only buy occasionally as a treat, as opposed to the tea I drink pretty much daily.
And yes, the cafe isn’t really a fair comparison, since you’re paying for the staff and the building and such, but for me, when I’m at work I have a choice between grabbing a drink from one of the cafes on the block, or putting on the kettle. It’s about the same amount of time and effort either way, so I think it makes sense to compare them.
When I visit a café, I intend to chill out a while, so I think I’m also paying for the atmosphere, seats, convenience etc. If you’re just grabbing a cup on the way to work, you get exactly zero atmosphere, so why pay extra for it. Since that takes about as much time and effort as brewing your own coffee, the price difference is just crazy. Why pay more for a paper cup of mediocre dark roast, when you could pay less for a delightful cup of light roast with fruity flavors. The kind of specialty coffee I used to drink, each cup would cost about half of what you would pay at a café.
Once I learned what to look for in a cup of coffee, it ruined café experiences for me. They just don’t have anything good. It’s either medium roast or dark roast. Cafe latte still works, because it covers the bitter taste of dark roast espresso so well.
~0.5kg of assorted leaf teas for 90€? I’d say it’s on the cheaper side, at least in comparison to what I can get either here, or by importing.
In other words: if you’re going to drink it, fingers crossed these are good. If the okumidori is what it claims it is, it’ll be worth it (although if I can read this properly, one brew off of a serving there seems to be on the low end; try steeping it more than once).
Only 90€? My boyfriend forbides me to buy more because i spend 242€ on tea in one day in one shop 😅
I guess you’re shopping in some next level tea store. Did you find really old puerh that time?
Im more a roiboss and black tea fan so i bought lots of that
Do you enjoy tea or offering it?
Can you afford high quality tea?If both your answer is yes, then yes it is normal to live within our means.
I wish I could come to your home enjoy it with you (^_-)
Both are quite enjoyable, but nowadays I’m drinking it more often than offering it to others. I’m expecting this haul to last several months, so It’s not an absurd amount of money in the long run.
Oh man.
I bought some Amber Muscatel Oolong Tea from Taiwan.
It’s about $50 per 10g. Insanely expensive and I haven’t even tried it yet. I’m trying to find a specific tea I’ve wanted to get ever since I’ve last tasted it back 10 years ago. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug
I’ve never even seen tea that expensive. I knew they exist, but the tea stores I visit don’t sell anything like that. Maybe the owners know that most customers wouldn’t understand a product like that.
Boutique teas are really low margins so I wouldn’t expect that from normal stores.
Can’t expect many stores to stock such expensive tea without any clientele.
Boutique teas are really low margins
On what basis are you making this claim?
That said the conclusion stands regardless. Only some shops stock these teas.
Completely normal. You were just stocking up. :-D
😀
I was worried there for a minute.Very practical. Think how much fuel/ electrons/ calories it would take to go back and forth to that store in that other town. You saved money!
that’s normal for me, i guess it’s even a bit more. enjoy
Thanks!
Sure will.
Eh I’ve been known to drop upwards of $300 on a single order, then again it’s meant to last for 4-6 months. (it never lasts).
Ok, so mine are just rookie numbers, LOL. I was expecting that when I posted this picture. I calculated that this stockpile should last a few months, but we’ll see.
As long as you think it’s normal then it doesn’t matter what other people think.
I would personally not pay that much though. I’d pay between 1 third to a half of what you paid for this. But I prefer fruits above exotic herbs for example.
Previously, I had access to a nice tea store, so I bought small bags more frequently. Usually, it was just 10-20 € each, but over the course of an entire year those numbers definitely did add up. This time, I just bought a lot more, since traveling to my favorite tea store isn’t as easy as it used to be.
How much tea are me talking about here?
Just weighed all of them. It’s about 542 g and that figure includes the three paper bags. Many of the teas in that store cost roughly 160 €/kg.
That seems pretty reasonable to me if they’re high quality.
The white tea is already familiar to me, and I can tell it’s really good. Haven’t tried the other two yet.
The sencha okumidori smells fantastic, so I have high expectations. Sadly, they didn’t have any gyokuro at the moment. Otherwise I would have bought that. Regardless, I don’t think this sencha will disappoint me.
Maybe I’ll start with the oolong tomorrow. It’s been close to a year since I had any, so I kinda miss that taste. All I know about this oolong is that it’s from China, which is a nearly useless description IMO. I guess it’s going to be a bit of a surprise then.
I like oolong a lot because it varies a lot. It has an additional step in the process where it’s oxidized - more or less fried a little. Depending on how much was it oxidized, the taste will range from white/non-Japanese green up to nutty, creamy. IDR the name now but there is one that to me tastes almost like cookies
Edit: Da Hong Pao
A few years ago, I went gaiwan shopping. I wanted a new one, because the old one was the cheapest and ugliest starter gaiwan you can find.
One of the local tea stores had a nice selection, and I found exactly what I was looking for. While I was there, I also bought one of those glass pitchers and a metal sieve. The store keeper seemed quite pleased with the deal, so she just gave me a little bag of oolong.
This one was a bit special though. It tasted very fruity and smelled like flowers. Can’t remember the name of that thing though.
I can relate. I have a few teas like “it was very tasty but which one was it?”. Now I maintain notes for stuffs like this: link, name, more or less accurate date and a comment with my thoughts about it
