The Ceiling for the World's Best Newborn

I asked in my first reader survey how much you were willing to shell out for the "world's best young sheng".    The chart below shows a third of you are reasonably budget minded while the other third of you are the kind of high-rollers pu-erh vendors salivate over.  The arithmetic average is $115 while the average mean and mode were both on a clean Benjamin ($100).  A few respondents refused to answer not wanting to give vendors such useful market data. What you are theoretically willing to pay on a survey is quite different than actually peeling forth those dollars in real life. (Drats I should have asked what maximum amount people have already paid...)

Where am I on that curve?  My wallet being curiously unopinionated never bothers to thank me or curse me so I have to rely on comparative living costs to orient myself.  Even $200 for a 357g beeng computes to only $1.68 per session for me.  My mini-pots use 2-3g of tea for a session so 357g/3g = 119 sessions or $200/119=$1.68.   Less than two bucks for me theoretically should not be too much for the "world's best" since I drink $1.75 canned coconut waters rather casually on a weekly basis after my runs.  I'm a bit bummed that I've spent over $1000 on coconut water but it's way cheaper than a gym membership.  However I still balk at even parting with $100 on a new sheng.  But I have also yet to meet this mind-blowing "world's best" newborn despite my diligent attempts. 

Fungibility of money is one of the most mind boggling achievements of human civilization.  An hour of massage not covered by insurance is around $100 including tip in the bay area - legitimate therapeutic licensed massage that is.  I thought nothing of buying two tickets to Aida yesterday for $190 for 3 hours of unparalleled operatic pageantry at the Met- actually I was happy to find such reasonable tickets.  A $100 high end beeng can bring you over a hundred hours of drinking pleasure. Why do I and a fair amount of the respondents share this mental block of going over $100 on a young sheng?  I'll leave that for discussion tonight. Good night!

Reader Survey Results Part I

Results of the survey are still trickling in but I thought I would post some of the initial surprises.  Many thanks to those who took a few minutes to share in this experiment and those who haven't yet taken the survey are still welcome to do so as I'm still compiling data for Part II.

The first surprise- despite Hobbe's assertion that "97% of you are Western males married to Oriental women", it turns out more readers connection to Asia is a silk bathrobe with an Oriental theme.  (Of course many of you may have checked that box in jest and I'm not there to personally double check your closet. But I have a feeling...)  I've had 50 responders thus far and only 4 identified themselves as being part of the fairer sex.  So women and Asians are definitely the minority here.  

I personally lounge around in my sweet dragon robe when tea blogging.  The gold tassels really do get in the way while I type and is especially cumbersome to my gongfu brewing style.  However nothing else gets me to feel cha qi in a way this robe can.

The responders tend to be serious pu-erh drinkers as a healthy majority engaged in everyday pu drinking.   I think there are many different kinds of tea nerds but the hardcore pu-erh drinkers are the nerdiest of them all. 

But of course daily drinking does not have any correlation to immediate supply.  It's an anonymous survey but I'm curious as anyone to know who the investors are and what they have invested in.   (Feel free to tell us!) 

I'll post rest of the answers over the weekend.  The maximum amount a reader is willing to spend on a new beeng is all over the place from $20 to $300!

Who's Reading This Blog Anyway

When I dusted off the tea closet in May,  I just wanted to organize my thoughts around what I should do about my 7 year old pu-erh collection.  Then all of the sudden MarshalN put the flashlight on this blog and I was no longer able to hide in obscurity.  I had to start taking it seriously.  The stats tell me this blog has gotten 15,000 hits.   At least 80% of the traffic is from porn fishing spambots, but I have undeniable proof that human eyeballs are behind those numbers as well. Even though only a handful of you comment, the stats tell me I have lurkers in almost every corner of the world.

I hooked up Google Analytics when I started to get serious hits via MarshalN, the Half Dipper and many other blogrolls.  Thank you.  I try my hardest every night to produce something worth your while.   Monday's Magic-Butt Shaping Cushion has put a curse on me and my humor well is nigh dry tonight and so I have to rely on statistics for tonight's post.  The screenshot below is taken from Google Analytics indicating unique visits.

What surprises me most is how global pu-erh interest has become with an active readership in Eastern Europe.

Of course Google Analytics really doesn't tell me the kinds of things I would love to know about you- the reader- so I've constructed a survey below.  Feel free to take it as a public service only and the answers will be anonymously posted soon.  

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.

Perils of Pickiness

Like most readers of tea blogs, I've spent a lifetime cultivating my palate.    I should be getting more discriminating but I'm purposely steering myself away from the inherent dangers of tea snobbery.   I want to know what prime stuff is but I don't want to have to need it.   Unlike chocolate where I won't consume any if quality bars are not around, I need tea daily.  In the last few years, I've been just forcing myself to quaff whatever is available even if it's the proverbial "slop of a drainage ditch".  But I'm pretty sure the "slop of a drainage ditch" in Lu Yu's time was definitely more disgusting than what counts as such now... although airplane teas can be downright demoralizing.

I hit a new low this month with Mothxx Parkxx's Tea on the flight to L.A.  I bleeped the name of this offending brand so none of their media representatives will find this obscure blog and blather on about how they create the highest quality tea from "field to cup".  Food service orange pekoe's are vile to begin with and the lukewarm airplane water highlights the worst features of such tea- flat, stale, and above all possessing a tired weak flavor that makes you feel sorry for the eternally lost potential of this tea.  To cheer myself up I made a full three course meal composed of  savory(salt and pepper)  and sweet chocolate bars and I just used the tea as a palate cleanser which worked well enough.  I actually had stowed many quality teas in my bag but doing a multi-rinse in the air while stuck in middle seat on a fifty minute flight is just a waste of good leaf to say nothing of frightening my poor seat companions.  (I have been told not in the kindest way that I own the most dangerous flying elbows endowed with perfect aim.  One time at a grocery store, I felt something soft and squishy.  I could not apologize and bow low enough to the poor woman and her left boob. )

There are many many situations in life where you can't drink your favored teas. And if all you have is easy access to terrible teas,  it's always best not to let it ruin your day.   A few years ago, I was enjoying dinner on a balmy night in Nubia with my lovely husband.  There were exactly two tea options on the menu-

• tea 
• tea with mint 

Because everyone dumps a quarter cup of sugar in their tea in Egypt, no one notices that almost all tea served is quite insipid with bags having been freely and recklessly exposed to air.  Tea time in Egypt as in the rest of the Middle East is not about the tea.  It's about sharing company and trying to contract type 2 diabetes.

The waiter brought me a steaming cup of black tea and showed me how I can just dip the entire mint sprigs in the teacup holding the bottom stems.  I really did wish at that moment that I had never tried fresh mint tea in my entire life so I could enjoy the novelty of the experience.  I've cultivated more than nine different kinds of mint over the years (orange mint, chocolate mint, apple mint, curly spear mint, tangerine mint, peppermint, pineapple mint, Egyptian mint plus others I vaguely remember) and have determined chocolate mint is my favorite for tea.  Furthermore, I've done numerous tastings against various honey to deem black button sage honey to be the optimal sweetener for mint tea.  I smiled at the waiter and gushed, "Wow! Fresh mint tea!"  I didn't want him to think that I thought there was anything wrong with his mint sprigs because in Egypt there is only exactly one kind of mint.    The tea that night was predictably insipid and the mint uninspiring but I still had a lovely evening with my husband contemplating the ancient ruins of Abu Simbel.   Life is always happier if you resolve to be satisfied with what you end up getting.  I would not be surprised that bloggers who concentrate on the positive aspects of any tea may be the most happiest among us.

(The two pics are of my overgrown mint patch that I rip out from time to time depending on the flowering season. Many gardeners may know this but mint varieties once hybridized becomes quite boring and so growing separate types of mint requires strict segregation. )

Ebay Temptations

Some days the only thing one is capable of doing after a long hard day's work is mindless tea surfing on ebay. I used to do this back in the day when you could browse all pu selection in one breezy sitting but now the field is crowded with all manner of foreign pu-erh vendors- some of them verging on downright bizarre.  Without much effort, I found this 2000 Purple(bud) Shu Brick for a mere $20 which includes shipping from China.

Dare I buy pu-erh from a vendor who also specializes in breast enlargement creams, a Magic Butt-Shaping Cushion as well as dried wild black ants?  Despite such warning signs,  this vendor has a 100% satisfaction rating from 6160 transactions.
(Despite the natural temptation, I recommend readers not to click on this tea vendor's "Breast Enlargement" Category- at least not at work or in front of young children.  It boggles my mind that this vendor has sold 78 bottles of "Must Up" B.E. Cream but only 2 beengs of 1997 Commemorate the Return of Hong Kong Tea)

Even stranger still, this vendor also carries an "intellectually gifted" shu.  As the vendor boasts:

" It is made meticulously by traditional craft chosen in national grade intangible cultural heritage and special blending technology."

I feel bad for most of my shu which weren't endowed with such intellectual gifts.

Can such a vendor actually carry decent tea? Or is this yet another obvious sandpit in the world of internet pu-erh buying?  Dare I waste another perfectly good $20 bill out of sheer curiosity? If things go badly,  I dare not complain to a vendor who sells such novelties.  I think I should still start a coin driven fund to check out such vendors as a public service.

The censor who would not let me use a certain rude but perfect phrase involving nuns yesterday absolutely insisted today that I include this final item. As he said to me, "It's a jungle out there."