Trades on Trades on Trades - 'Sample Mountain' Series Kickoff

You know that feeling when you spend too much money on tea but you justify it cause you're buying a bunch of samples and learning a lot...and then you slow down a bit and start hammering things you know you like and start spending too much that way...and then stop for a while and look at your massive hoard of cakes that you like but you're willing to part with a few of cause now you're interested in branching out again so you put up a trade offer or two and blink and you've done shy of like $3k or so in trades and now you have almost as many new samples as you had old samples but your old samples still out measured a pretty good chunk of your stash of things you hammered and now you're like, "damn, that's a lot of tea to go through..."?

You uh, you know...that...feeling? Perhaps? No? - scratches head uncomfortably - Ok that's, yeah, that's...alright. Cool - it's cool, yeah..that's good...

Enter: My summer, 2025.

I think I pumped out about $2400-2900 in trades in like...idk, two months.

The simultaneously potentially entertaining, kinda neat, kinda not that big a deal, maybe impressive to some truth is this all came about from essentially 2 cakes and some other smaller deals.

I've written about it before: one of the most memorable and enjoyable sessions I've personally had in pu'er came from this guy 👉

2007 Yang Qing Hao (YQH) Xishi Shenpin

Context: This is a cake I know very well from the brand I know the most from the category and age of tea I drink the most. This statement has been true and growing over about 4 years. I’ve gone through more than a cake of this and sampled out

Tea and ClayBrandon Kendall

So, I thought to myself: "Self, you know what we should do?"
My self replied: "I don't know Self, what do you think we should do?"
I responded back: "I think, and hear me out on this:

Since we're pretty sure we want to start branching out and not drinking YQH every day - 4+ times a week on the low end (and as enjoyable a phase as that was and with absolutely no intent to stop enjoying YQH despite the haters):

Perhaps, just perhaps, we should see if any upstanding tea server citizens would like to have a nab at a super premium cake in exchange for a metric shitload (technical measurement) of quali-tea samples of a bunch of stuff I haven't dealt with as much. What say you?

I'll spare you the self-narrative I did that and it went pretty damn well. A few short deals later and I had one cake going to one guy and one cake split between two others. Fast forward just a few more months and string of smaller deals with different inventory lists and we arrived at this mother load (other technical measurement) I'm calling "Sample Mountain". It's uh...strewn about very loosely sorted by who sent what in a multitude of various size cardboard boxes.

My spare room looks like a bomb went off. But with tea 😉

While not all of these teas shown are in the new "Sample Summer" round, most are. Here's the list...mostly:

Pu’er

Oolong

Pulong 😏

Hei Cha

SO:

Obviously this is going to take quite some time. Just right there is roughly 120 teas, one for each ml in the average Yixing 😂

One tea a day is half a year...and uh, many of these teas are 15-20+ grams. Some are even cakes or halves. There's certainly a possibility I've misspelled or ChatGPT misrepresented a few teas in the table cause I for sure couldn't read all the handwriting perfectly and I sure wasn't hand typing all that. I'll dig into properly knowing what each sample is at time of tasting.

Looking very forward to enjoying my way through these rather than zooming my way through them. It might take a year, maybe more, maybe less. I'll certainly want to intersperse teas I know I like throughout as well and hit some tasting note entries for some of them as well. In the end, I'd like to try to hit a "Tasting Tuesday" schedule weekly, but we'll see. It didn't quite take yet and I'd rather practice enjoying my craft than forcing a pace I'm not ready for or interested in. I drink tea when I want to drink tea. Some days, that's two a day. Other days, that's none. I'm going to live and let live and just do me at my pace. If you want to be, I'm happy to have you come along for the ride 🙂