Tracking

Aging

I’m starting to think it’s best to not think about your tea: basically, to forget about it until it arrives at your door or at your tea table. “But Tea Secrets, what about mold?” Finding mold on your cakes is like finding that your package has been sent to the wrong post office, or that it’s been taken into customs, or it’s been sent back to the vendor for no reason (all of which has happened to me and probably some of you). If there’s mold in your storage, or your tea is stuck somewhere, it’s not necessary to know right when it happens. Eventually you’ll smell something funny, or remember “hey, I feel like my tea was supposed to arrive sometime this week.” Constantly checking your cakes or refreshing 17Track is only going to bring a lot of anxiety into your relationship with tea.

Aging young tea is like ordering aged puerh 10 years in advance. As you try the aging tea, it tells you a bit about where it’s at, kind of like how postal tracking tells you a little bit about where your parcel is. You never REALLY know when it’s going to arrive. But then, eventually, it does arrive.