this is my tea storage and aging station! i have well over 12 lbs of tea in here, not even counting the extra weight from non-tea materials. i'm not going to be talking about the specific teas i have in this post-- that's what the What I'm Drinking Today posts are for.
also there's some terminology i use that i forget if i've explained or not but i tried my best here. here's one i think i missed: a bing is a pressed cookie of tea leaves wrapped in a paper package for shipment and convenient aging. typically 357g, they often come in that or 200g sizes these days. the wrappers from chinese and taiwanese retailers often have a lot of information about the tea, region, age, and factory, whereas western bing wrappers tend to be bold artistic designs. it's an interesting shift!
so, in order from top to bottom, left to right we have:
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the assortment. this is where i put the tea i don't have or need a dedicated storage bin for. you'll notice there's no hydro-thermometer in there, this is because they each have their own retort pouches. i don't actually need to keep them in a storage bin at all, but it's somewhat convenient. you'll also notice the big ass retort pouch resting on top, i just don't have room for that one but it's my daily drinker.
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this is the shou box. for traditional mainland chinese storage leaves. you can immediately see a brick in there as well as a couple of bings, a retort pouch or two and a hydro-thermometer. i've talked about shous a little bit before on here. wet-pile fermented after the kill green process, the oxidation process, these teas tend to have a robust, deep, earthy flavor. sometimes mineral, metallic, or rocky. i actually have one tea in there (the brick) that claims to be a sheng but i have it in the shou box because it drinks like a shou. the teas that are in here will continue aging gracefully, as i have controlled temperature and humidity and air quality in these totes.
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this is the sheng box! the sheng box excites me. it has the most energetic tea in my collection, so i'm usually pretty eager to crack this one open in the morning. i've again talked about shengs a little bit before on here. fresh Yunnan leaves kill greened and then essentially slapped straight into their cookie-like wrappers and stored for aging. these age much more slowly and more awkwardly than shous but finely aged shengs tend to be some of the most highly sought after teas for their combination of delicate flavor and vibrant energy.
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this is my white tea box. i'm honestly not too familiar with white tea, i understand it tends to be more floral, both in terms of flavor and more literally-- a lot of these leaves are the top two with the tea flower, and i even have one jade needle tea that's straight up just unopened flower buds. as you might expect, these teas tend to be bright, green, and floral-nectary in flavor. there's also often a sort of hay-like flavor component in these. i don't have a lot of different kinds of white, but i do have a bing of 2009 baimudan aged white that is honestly probably the best tea i have in my entire collection. tastes like honey, somehow. it's so sweet and warming and so so good.
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this is my backup shou box. there's nothing in here but six bings of 2019 tu lin phoenix shou. i mentioned this before in the tu lin phoenix post, but i bought a SHITload of this tea. it was cheap and hell and tasty, and so it's one of my daily drinkers, and so i'm eager to try to age it myself and see how that ends up after a decade or so. in order to age teas you want to keep the temp and humidity around 60°/60%, give or take like 10 of each. lower is preferable to higher, to a point.
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finally, we have the HK storage tote. i only have one bing of one kind of tea in here, it is a shou, and it both deserves and needs its own storage situation. i don't really know how to describe HK storage shou to you if you haven't experienced it, but it smells even more earthy and pungent than any mainland shou you could name. i get beets from the aroma of the dry leaf, but the tea itself is remarkably sweet. very interesting stuff.
these are all iirc 128 oz. Sistema plastic totes with a battery powered hydro-thermometer (probably anything will do, so no brand recs here) and 69%-75% humidity Boveda humidity control bags. i bought most of this tea from Yunnan Sourcing, Liquid Proust, and White2Tea. I got the finest tea in my collection, the aged white 2009 baimudan, from purple cloud tea house. links to any/all of these products available upon request