Tea and Zen

I am super excited. The title says all.

I had heard a lot of good about What-cha on /r/tea so I decided to check the website out. The variety of tea that was available was anything but disappointing. Their variety rivals that of Upton Tea Imports. The catalog isn't as huge, but the variety, damn!


I ordered something from pretty much each category. My order includes:

• Intro to Tea Collection  (stock rotates depending on availability)
• Malawi Zomba Pearls White Tea
• China Zhejiang Wild Dragon Well 'Long Jing' Green Tea
• Kenya 'Steamed Purple' Green Tea
• Korea Dong Cheon Daejak Semi-wild Green Tea
• Taiwan Four Seasons Oolong
• Nepal Silver Oolong Tea
• Vietnam Red Buffalo Oolong Tea
• Kenya 'Hand Rolled Purple' Oolong Tea
• India Assam Kanoka Hand-Made Black Tea
• Nepal Golden Tips Black Tea
• Vietnam 'Wild Boar' Black Tea
• Kenya Kangaita OP1 Black Tea
• Australia Arakai Spring Green Tea
• Australia Arakai Summer Black Tea
• Georgia Wild 'Guguli' Hand-Made Black Tea
• Georgia Old Gentleman Black Tea
• Brazil Grandma Ume's Black Tea
• Vietnam Wild 'Mountain Mist' Silver Needle White Tea
• Vietnam Gui Fei Oolong
• Colombia Bitaco Black Tea
• Colombia Bitaco Green Tea
• India Bihar Doke Hand-Made 'Diamond' Green Tea
• China Anhui Huoshan Huang Ya Yellow Tea
• India Bihar Doke Hand-Made 'Rolling Thunder' Oolong Tea
• Malawi 'Dr. Hastings' Whim' Oolong Tea
• Nepal Jun Chiyabari 'Himalayan Bouquet' Oolong Tea
• Taiwan Ali Shan Oolong Tea
• Taiwan Gui Fei Oolong Tea
• Taiwan Shan Lin Xi Oolong Tea
• Taiwan Wenshan Baozhong Oolong Tea
• China Yunnan Silver Needle White Tea
• Japan Obubu Kyobancha Green Tea
• Japan 2015 Bancha Goishicha Black Tea
• 2007 Jingjiatang Bada Raw Puerh Cake 
• China Fujian Anxi 1996 Se Zhong Oolong Tea

And two samples from Alistar:

• Kenyan Silver Needle White Tea
• 2015 What-cha 'Lao Shu Bai Cha' Raw Puerh 

They are all 10g samples except for the "Australia Arakai Spring Green Tea", which is 5g. 365g of tea in total. 

The reviews for these teas will start coming out in September as I have a reasonable queue of teas in my blog right now. Possibly until the end of the year it'll mostly be reviews of these teas, with some others mixed in. The main reason I've had tea reviews come out every two days up till this point is I have had 25g to get through for a vast majority of them. This gave me time to get through all, or most of the 25g before opening another.

I can't tell you how excited I am to try all of these! I've only had a few of the teas that I ordered (from other sources) so this will be a lot of new experiences for me.

I'll hopefully continue to update every two days so that I can keep a reasonable queue. As with the other reviews, I'll be trying the tea before the review is posted. My semester will definitely murder me dead so I need to have a bit of a queue in the worst case scenario. I would like to publish them faster (one a day) but then I'll either run out or school will bone me and not make this practical.

I hope you will enjoy reading these reviews as much as I enjoy trying these teas!