/tea/ general

For me it's:

Oolong > Darjeeling > Green > Aged Pu-erh > White > Other black teas >>>>>>>>> anything sold in a tea bag

Oolong strikes a nice balance between black and green which I could drink every day. There are also varieties which taste like milk, and other cool ones, overall top tier.

Darjeeling is the king of black teas, tastes and smells like flowers, very light.

Green teas are nice, tend to floral/herbal tasting. I especially like the roasted greens or Genmaicha. Often green teas are flavored because they can be boring.

Pu-erhs taste like the smell of dried, slowly decaying Autumn leaves which is nice occasionally but I couldn't drink it every day. You also have to pay out the ass to get one.

White tea is basically slightly flavored water, imo not worth it but some people like them.

Most black teas are kind of boring, imo. For a while I liked Persian style tea (with cardamom and Assam) but it got boring.

Most things in tea bags aren't worth it because they're very one-note or insubstantial unless you oversteep them and then they're bitter as balls. They're often filled with dustings.

Russian caravan

Do you live in the middle of nowhere or why do you have to pay so much for pu erh?

Where can you buy Pu-erh that's aged? Most of the stuff I've seen in stores is the fresh stuff.

Most online vendors offer aged pu-erh for a decent price. Never trust eBay or Amazon though. Easy way to get jipped.

Personally like lapsang souchong. Reminds me of both smoked, cured meats and the humidor of a cigar lounge.

>bring some lapsang souchong to work for everyone to try
>all the men really like it
>all the women think its disgusting

Why can't women handle the smokey goodness?

aren't most commercial pu ers artificially aged (except for the high quality ones obviously)?

Been trying Jin Jun Mei these past two days. I really like it, but I doubt I'll buy it regularly. I agree with on Laoshan teas being great. Love the toasted flavor they have and would love to find some other teas like that. I think my favorite is the Gan Zao Ye, even if it isn't a real tea.

Today I brewed white tea for the first time. It was Yunnan (shop) Bai Mudan, it was fucking amazing, the best tea I have ever tried. It was fruity, subtle sweet with rich taste and aroma, I can't shill this fucking enough. And it was my first time so I could not get the proportions right meaning it will only get better with time. I brewed 7 gramms for a 150 ml pot and it lasted about 7 times.
How do you brew your Bai Mudan and Tieguanyin?

That was my impression. I first tried Pu-erh from a brick-and-mortar store, Red Blossom Tea Company which I know sells legit stuff because so many of them are the artificial shit.

>Easy way to get jipped
Yeah, I've heard people having success with online vendors but it's harder to tell what's real if it's not in front of you.

what puer did you have? There's a really wide range of flavours so most people dont take a liking to it at first.

I feel like I'm in the same boat here. How do you brew Jin jun mei, I've tried it western and gong fu (cant remember the parameters) and it never tasted like it infused well even when it was brewed for ~5 mins

+1 for laoshan black and green

teegschwendner.de/en/teashop/black-tea/china-black-tea/2151/china-mannong-pu-erh?c=201
This was the first, has a really nice smell as well. (note that I liked tea for a long time but only drank pleb tea, so it was kind of a new awakening)
After that I went to an asian supermarket and bought asia-in.de/Pu-Erh-Tea-Yunnan-227g
I like the first one better, but the second one offers better value for money in my estimation

I enjoy some brown rice tea

how does it taste? like a malty green tea?

I've been trying to make decent chai but I can't the recipe right, everytime is has a nasty aftertaste. I like the spice in chai but I'm obviously fucking something up.

I use
>cloves
>cardamom seeds
>cinnamon sticks
>pepper
>ginger
>darjeeling for the tea

Aside from my measurements which are pretty fucked, any ideas? I've seen people use star anise and rooibos but I'm not sure what they taste like

There's a few different kinds of pu'er, the ones you can get for cheap have been fermented to simulate aging

You can still buy the real shit though. My local tea shop has a 35 year old cake that they've been hanging on to.

I just did it my usual way with a brewing basket at roughly gong-fu proportions. I'm not quite sure how much it was because I just used the whole sample packet that I got with an order of some other teas, but it was plenty strong with just 30 seconds on the first infusion and I've gotten to the forth at a minute with it still strong.

I think lapsang souchong is the only tea I actually like

Try Russian Caravan.
It's a blend with some Lapsang Souchong in it.

Chamomile is the only "tea" I enjoy entirely.

I loath the taste of darjeeling but drinking a really good one induces the sort of euphoria that I associate with proper drug experiences - but without any of the side effects.

Nigga you getting high on a mild dose of caffeine

I'm caffeine-hardened as fuck tho...

It's about L-theanine, theobromine, and theophylline at least as much as the caffeine.

Nigga Russian prisoners have to boil a fuck-tonne of tea into a concentrated caffeine syrup over several hours to get a high and here you are going to space on a cup of regular ass darjeeling

I mean, it was a dope ass cup of darjeeling...
estate grown first flush.

It's tea nigga not LSD

I guess you've just never had good tea.

Nigga if tea were a drug then Lin Zexu and the Daoguang Emperor would have set that shit on fire with all the opium they hated

Go roleplay somewhere else you fat sack of shit.

they hated opium because it was a foreign way of control retard.

pu'er tastes like the way cigar butts smell to me. I only drink it when someone else orders a pot for the table. I mainly stick to not-as-fermented oolong teas or jasmine.

And how exactly would a foreign way of control have worked if niggas could get blazed on domestic fucking tea, nigga?

Got damn.

Turns out that opiates are somewhat stronger and more addictive than caffeine.

So jolly old England waged two whole wars and established an entirely new colony to get their hands on a less effective means of control when they had perfectly good opium farms right at home

Nigga...

Do history majors just naturally become compulsive liars?
Or are compulsive liars just naturally drawn to that particular branch of academia, finding the hard sciences a less practical field for their talents?

So I got an electric kettle with a bunch of preset temperatures for tea and the lowest one is labeled delicate (160F). What constitutes delicate tea? Next lowest temperature is green at 170F.

white tea and some greens

right now im craving white tea, or white peony tea, or oolong. i like the low caffeine content. green tea is a bit too grassy, and i just dont crave black tea. but, if you have never brewed assam in a glass carafe, with the afternoon sunlight filtering through the ruby red liquid, then you have not yet lived.

>general

sencha

fuck you niggy we have /teagen/ all the time.

For me, its green tea from japan

My personal chai blend. Fragrant and uplifting without caffeine jitters. Pic related.

Use cardamom pods not seeds. Go easy on the cloves. If you use pepper, use whole black corns. Try to avoid dried ginger powder- chopped dried ginger root is a better bet (candied ginger also works well if added to the teapot). You need a robust tea, lapsang or Russian caravan are ideal. I use star anise personally, and dried rose petals.

just purchased some genmaicha from Amazon. It's pretty tasty, roasty and kind of savory. Nice, I think it's the best taste I've ever had in tea. It almost has a Japanese ramen taste but yet not and then you remember it's tea.

Bai Mubump