Dark and dusty leaves awaken after their years-long slumber, dry and dormant in decades past, now brought to life again.

Anyone reading who knew me in the 2010s will know, once I was deeply into tea hobby! Tea hobby was something I spent a lot of the late 2010s engrossed in, and spending much of my paychecks at the time on it. Of course, then I wasn’t as wise as I now, and I spent a lot of money on teaware and various other guff that I didn’t actually need. In that time, I too imported a lot of good tea from China; my main focus had mostly always been shou pu-erh. Shou Pu-erh is a type of tea that ages very well, and often only betters with age, so it’s not a bad thing to sit on a big supply of! And that’s what I did!

I’ve been getting back into it these days, and it’s good to return with the sense of a more mature mind! (If I have matured in those years…) Now, instead of expensive cerulean teapots, I drink out of a waffle house mug! (Classy) but I still have my lovely shou pu-erh! Lots of tea has been left over from those days a decade ago, and all of it has aged well. I’d been drinking a bit from my stores, but I recently stocked up again and got an order from White2Tea! A vendor I mostly avoided in the days of the past, but it matches 31-year-old Oshie’s vibe a lot more.

So what is Shou Pu-erh anyways?

As you can see a little from the picture, Pu-erh is a type of tea that’s not often sold as a loose leaf or in a tea bag like other teas; instead, it’s pressed down into these compressed cakes. It ages very well like this, and you scrape bits of the cake off into your teapot or whatever, and it brews up like normal tea from there! I enjoy shou pu-erh because it’s a very dark type of tea. It’s often described as having an earthy flavor, and I’d have to agree. Muddy and dark and maybe a tinge of owl shit aroma. The aspect of shou pu-erh that I enjoy the most is the deep molasses sweet flavor that comes out on the second infusion or so. It’s extremely delicious, but maybe a bit of an acquired taste…

I don’t have too much to say about it really, other than it’s fun to get back into an old hobby. Getting back into the scene is interesting after being away so long. I want to say many things have changed, but it’s all mostly the same.

The world of tea moves slowly it seems.