Meetup with Mr. Mopar

privacy concerns give this meetup capture an unusual look

I've talked with this well-known tea enthusiast in group discussions for years, and he agreed to join an online meetup session with those tea friends.  It seemed a great chance to hear about US sheng pu'er storage, and tea circles, even onto earlier forms of US tea culture, since he seemed to be at it for awhile.  First some background.

John (he shares my name) got into tea around a decade ago, and seemed to move fast towards pu'er obsession, a process that took me and many others some time to develop.  He's from the East Coast of the US, with the reference in his online name related to car interest.  We actually met online twice, since the first session was limited in time and two of my regular circle of friends were dealing with illness issues.  Per usual this summary is just some ideas that seemed interesting to me, with filtering to focus on a central theme, on talking to John, versus serving as a faithful representation of everything expressed.  They both had a lot to contribute, that I've left out describing, or at least attributing.  One writes a tea blog, Teakurrim, worth checking out.

We talked a lot about storage, favorites, and vendor options in the first session, which only Ralph also joined.  It was interesting, but a lot of what one might expect.  I was wondering if he focused mainly on aged factory teas, since those came up most in online discussion, but at least not exclusively at this point, since he is exploring a little of everything.  He likes intense versions of sheng, so not so much the lighter, sweeter, fruity and floral "oolong pu'er / pulong" range.  Seemingly he is more into aged teas than drinking it young, but even that doesn't seem to work as an absolute generality, since he described his taste preferences as broad.  The preferred vendor and source list he mentioned included more than it left out, on from Yunnan Sourcing and through many other names into atypical source options, just stopping short of random trials through Taobao.

His storage preference is kind of conventional for US tea circles, towards the safe side of wetter.  He uses the mylar isolated, boveda controlled approach.  Ralph and I really grilled him about how many tea cakes he has, and the range is in the hundreds, if I remember right, so a good bit.  

John sells tea, which he described as not really a conventional vendor practice, but just selling some cakes to free up funds to buy more of others.  I noticed a post about selling some of a version not long ago, on Tea Forum here, for an early 2000s CNNP Bulang.  I remember mention of him selling one particular Dayi numbered version as a known theme, just not which one.  We didn't talk that much about vending issues, related to him selling tea.

We talked about how far along he prefers teas in relation to fermentation level, and a running theme that kept repeating was that he sees his own preference as a yardstick that doesn't apply to others, that he just happens to like what he likes.  He said that different teas are better or more ideal fermented more or less, a pretty standard take on things.  One thing he said, that's not something you often hear, is that fermentation level can go too far, and that it makes sense to adjust storage conditions once a tea is where you like it.  This would relate to discussing 20 or so year old versions, most likely, or older, and tie back to the conditions designed to keep fermentation pace moving.  I reviewed an 80s Thai sheng once that tasted a bit like charcoal, seemingly degraded, and it was nice after the first 4 infusions or so, but definitely further along for fermentation than it needed to be.

Since Huyen was also present in the second round it was interesting checking on her take on fermentation preference for sheng there in Vietnam.  It's a type they drink a lot of, her and her family, all from there (with a partial background intro related to them making tea here).  It seemed likely that they wouldn't be focusing on drinking 15 to 20 year old versions there, and what she said bore that out, that relatively fully aged sheng isn't a popular theme there.  

I tend to like a lot of younger or partly aged versions myself, and can appreciate and relate to trying lots of more fully aged versions, and own some cakes that are like that, but nothing like the hundreds that John owns.  Huyen showed a couple of pressed Vietnamese sheng cakes that she had handy; although the tea type may come up more as maocha (loose versions) there pressed cakes are also around.

Related to other participant themes, two others joined us in the second session, which made it interesting for drawing on different input.  I suppose it diluted the "Mr. Mopar as meetup theme" subject a bit too, but those talks are always organic discussions, never structured as interviews, or subject-oriented.  This summary rounds off their input to stick with a theme more than them not contributing ideas or input.

It was interesting to me how across themes John kept returning to the idea that preference dictates what is best, related to tea types, storage conditions, and so on.  We all get that, to an extent, but it's also easy to let our own preference sort of organically take on the function of determining what is best, even beyond that scope.  In taking about brewing he covered how he likes to make tea, and variations based on different daily preference, all offered as trial and error informed outcomes based only on his own preference.

As far as social media channels go I knew him first through Steepster, which is relatively inactive now (I think).  He seems to check in most with Discord servers, the pu'er sub on Reddit, and Tea Forum.  He brought up an interesting sounding past Hong Kong based pu'er forum that I missed out on, which he said went inactive some years ago, probably before I focused most on sheng, as of about 4 years ago.  John said that he's open to talking to people about tea issues, and of course there's that vending sideline theme, so I'll include his email contact here, per his request, a step that never comes up here, since it's usually easy to cite Facebook profiles instead (mrmoparnrv@gmail.com). 

A bit of a tangent, to me the main tea discussion areas are still on Facebook now, like Gong Fu Cha, with the Pu'er Tea Club a bit quieter now.  The FB group I moderate, International Tea Talk, is currently in an awkward place for being mostly frequented by international vendors, which can be interesting, but really leads to too much commercial promotion.  All of these groups seem to thrive based on having a half dozen or more most active members fill in a social network feel, and it's interesting how Gong Fu Cha stays active without that.  It's nice the Discord groups sort of change the balance a little, enabling people to set up small groups that use an old mainframe discussion format, versus FB groups and such being an option.

It was interesting talking with John, although for it just being about ordinary tea preference and storage themes this summary doesn't seem to come together as a story.  That is the broader story of tea culture though, lots of people taking up different preferences and practices, now including social media and meetup channel options.