Three principles for learning tea:
- Do not worship anyone;
- Do not worship any tea;
- Trust yourself.
In one line: do not blindly idolize masters, do not canonize a single tea, and believe in yourself.
The previous article explained why you should not blindly worship masters. Trusting yourself is simple and easy to understand. But why not canonize a single tea?
The greatest "divine tea" in the industry? I would say it is 88 Qing.
Let me use 88 Qing to explain why you should not worship any particular tea.
Is 88 Qing delicious?
I believe I have drunk real 88 Qing a few times. How to put it - it is barely a good tea. Why "barely"? Its cleanliness (jingdu) is not enough. For a tea with such towering status and such a high price, I feel it falls short: insufficient cleanliness and insufficient refinement to be a truly high-end tea.
Like my fifth crowdfunding tea, Yiwu Gu Yun - also barely a good tea, but inexpensive, only a few hundred yuan. Its flaw is also cleanliness; otherwise there is nothing wrong, and many Houyue tea friends like it a lot. Yiwu Gu Yun is an early work of mine, when my understanding of cleanliness was still average - even with strict sourcing, the cleanliness was just not there.
The 96 Zhenchunya is much cleaner - a genuine high-end tea.
88 Qing also has a pile of problems
1. Storage problems.
Plenty of 88 Qing have been ruined by bad storage - many carry that pungent, insecticidal smell.
2. Authenticity problems.
Why does 88 Qing never run out? Why do these "masters" always have some to sell?
There must be a lot of fake 88 Qing.
3. Definition problems.
88 Qing does not refer to one single tea; it is a batch of 7542 recipe raw cakes produced by the state-run Menghai Tea Factory in the mid-to-late 1980s. Yet today any old raw tea from around that period is called 88 Qing.
Is the tea at fault? No. The problem is these people.
Instead of picking through a trash heap, choose other teas.
Do not obsess over such teas, and never worship them. Rather than fencing with liars and choosing among garbage teas, go find other good teas.
Restating the three principles
- Do not worship anyone;
- Do not worship any tea;
- Trust yourself.
If you do not agree, there is no need to keep reading my articles.
My advice for learning tea
Read a few books seriously
Choose books roughly in these areas as needed:
- Tea history
- The Classic of Tea
- The six tea categories
- Tea processing
- Tea chemistry
- Tea and health
Make the body "light"
Tea speaks; you need to understand it. Details in my article "Tea Speaks - How Can You Understand It?".
Always stay skeptical
Read any book with skepticism.
Take myself: I have read many books on tea processing and still could not brew a good pot. Example: books say kill-green pot temperature 300 degrees, leaf temperature 65 degrees. In reality the pot is about 300, but the leaf temperature far exceeds 65. Following books, I tried many times and raw tea simply would not kill-green properly.
Trusting a book completely is worse than no book. Books give you a framework and a way of thinking, but you must verify with your own practice.
Stay skeptical of your teacher's words (articles/videos) too.
This article, all my articles and videos - read them skeptically and verify for yourself. Master's words deserve even more suspicion.
Even training classes should be studied critically; verify whenever you can.
Trust yourself.
Everyone has their own judgment - especially with tea, do you not know the taste yourself?
You know whether food is good; why not tea?
Trust your senses. Even if your body is "heavy" and you cannot catch subtle nuances, still trust yourself - the tea you enjoy right now may simply suit you better.
Summary
Take more notes and review them often.
When you meet a tea that interests you - one you especially love - keep a sample.
Make a review plan and regularly schedule time to taste those samples.
Keep your life light and learn to hear what tea says.
Trusting yourself is the precondition for learning tea.
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