Alex wrote:
> Michael where did you get this stuff? It sounds good. I am not much
> of a wuyi drinker either but I love that gravel taste.
>
> Karsten I find that tea keeps for a really long time in those
> vacuum-sealed bags. Two weeks ago I was digging around in my tea
> closet and found one that claimed to contain Si Ji Chun (Taiwanese
> oolong). The bag was in complex characters too - clearly Taiwanese.
> Now the last time I went to Taiwan was two summers ago, but that was
> for work and I didn't do any tea shopping, and furthermore I have no
> memory of owning this stuff, so I must have bought it the last time I
> *lived* in Taiwan, which was in the summer of 2000! I opened it and
> it's amazing - honestly, it's better than most of the stuff I have now,
> that I spend zillions of dollars on getting from internet vendors.
> Incredible focused flavors. And, at the time I didn't know jack about
> tea, I just bought what I liked. So I'm also wondering what's going on
> with storage and why this particular tea really seemed to thrive in the
> six years it spent in a dark, airless environment.

I have a similar experience with two bags of tea. One was an
air-tight, sealed bag of A Li Shan that I got here on the mainland and
the other was a bag of A Li Shan that one of my Taiwanese students
brought back from Taiwan for me. When I was moving, I came across both
of the bags sorta under some stuff in the bottom of my tea closet. The
Taiwanese bag survived well and when brewed the tea wasn't too bad.
The Chinese bag had air in it.

You feel that the bags from Taiwan are of better quality than the
sealed bags from China? They do seem thicker, that's for sure.