It's been five years that I've been writing a blog about tea--the time flies. I wrote about how tea culture seems to be changing last year so I'll go into how my own perspective and experience of tea has changed instead.
I got started just before my daughter was born; a lot has changed beyond tea.
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meeting her family, in that first hour |
Starting a blog and the rest was as much about exploring social media through a subject interest. It does carry over into tea group discussions, which ties to co-founding a Facebook tea group.
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a Laos tea garden (credit Kinnari Tea) |
Discussing tea in groups keeps renewing my consideration of a "path to tea," of a typical experience curve. I guess there wouldn't be any typical version; the starting point, steps, and how far it all goes would vary. It is just a drink; I love it but can relate to people not really becoming obsessed. I don't tend to pass on guidance for what to experience, or approach, although I did lay out some basic factors in an introductory guide once.
I seem to have come full-circle for preferences, in a sense. I've just spent a year delving into sheng pu'er, a type and subject that takes more exploration to piece together, so that kind of review keeps going. New types, like a Japanese black tea I just reviewed (only the second I've tried), keep coming up, but less of them. What I really meant was that I can appreciate a broader range of types and quality levels than ever before now. For a long time teas being new to me or as good as better versions I've tried, or even better, made them seem all the more appealing, but now the main appeal is whatever the immediate experience offers, which varies.
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it doesn't get much more Thai than this |
I'll give an example: I've purchased that orange colored flavored version of loose Thai tea for the first time this year. Even more unconventional, for a tea enthusiast, only this year I went back to drinking tea from tea bags. Sometimes people who know I like tea but don't know which types pass those on. In the past I'd give them away again. Trying a version of Lipton early this year seemed to reinforce that those just wouldn't work for me. But I tried again, mixed with sweetened condensed milk at work, and kept on with it. One was a tea version from Kenya, mentioned in this post reviewing Cold War Berlin tea history, covered there related to mixing it with willow herb, Ivan chay. I like willow herb now too (even though it's odd), and I've been dabbling in tisanes more.
Of course I can still relate positively with better tea, very exceptional Chinese oolongs (like my overall favorite tea, Wuyi Origin's Rou Gui).
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Wuyi Origin Rou Gui; some versions do stand out |
Lately I've been wondering where to go from here, related to blogging. A classic blogger that I've learned a lot from has been saying that he's worked through a lot of what he has to say. There seems to be an experience curve related to talking about tea that ends in just experiencing it, and not talking about it. Another older local friend seems to have even cut back drinking it. I doubt I'll do many more 100+ post years, or keep up the reviewing pace, but for now interesting subjects and new tea experiences keep coming up. I'll stick with it.
Post-script: about traffic, and some favorite posts
I keep the TChing content limited in word-count because even 700-800 word post versions seem to run long related to what else appears there. I wanted to mention two more things here though, about readership volume, and mention some favorite past posts.
In a sense it doesn't matter how many or few people read this blog since it's not about validation through traffic as a way of keeping score, and there's no commercial angle that volume relates to. All the same I'll mention readership, since it is one dimension, best shown by a stat graphic:
As of about a month ago individual page views dropped considerably, seemingly mostly because Facebook changed their feed-display algorithm in a way that decreased it, since most viewer traffic had been routed by Facebook link notices. Popular posts had been viewed 300 or so times in the first few days, or over 500 for some non-review themes, and that's way down now.
No matter. It's hard to be sure how many of those 300k views were even people anyway, versus bots. I'm not sure what the point is, really just sharing that, since that dimension never comes up.
I wanted to mention some all-time favorite posts too; somehow that seems appropriate to the retrospective theme. Picking favorites among review posts just didn't work. I liked lots of different teas for different reasons, and most of the write-ups seemed a bit wordy.
Most of these were written in the last two years, when I've branched into topic research and tangents a bit more than I had before then. Only two don't mention tea at all, about my son becoming a novice monk.
Most of these were written in the last two years, when I've branched into topic research and tangents a bit more than I had before then. Only two don't mention tea at all, about my son becoming a novice monk.
Tea Related Research
Other
Tea Shopping in New York City
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not so into it yet but these two will be my favorite tea drinkers later |
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