2015 was a busy year for me for teas. When 2015 started, I had pulled out my entire stash and entered it into a spreadsheet, down to each different tea bag and tea sample. I also tracked how much tea I drank, in grams, every day for the entire year.
If you want to learn more about my spreadsheets – Tea Stash Spreedsheet | Tea Consumption Spreadsheet.
Year has passed and I got all this data!
Oolong Owl 2015 Tea Stash Data
I’m starting 2016 with 596 teas!
Actually, 5 hours before the new year I entered in a bunch of pu’er samples I forgot to deal with and I jumped to 601 teas! I refused to start 2016 with 600 teas so I drank down a few teas and threw out some matcha I found that was from 2012 (eww). I could of probably purged a bunch of teabags, some are from 2011 and if I didn’t drink them then, I’m sure as not drinking them later. Hah, 88 Sheng and 88 Shous – lucky!
I took note of how much teas I had end of the month, I also tracked how many I finished… 391 teas finished!
I found my stash spreadsheet effective in keeping track of my entire stash of teas. Previously I used Steepster, which was really difficult to search, keep up to date, and you are at the mercy if the site ever went down/teas deleted. Also I found it quick reference to quickly look something up on my spreadsheet if someone asks if I tried something and whether I liked it or not.
Here was January 31 2015’s stash numbers for comparison:
For 2016 I want to keep track of the numbers of each tea type per month, it would of been interesting to watch how each of my stash changed each month.
Looking at my stash, most of this year’s bulk was pu’er… thanks to me buying a bunch from White2tea, Mandala Tea, Crimson Lotus Tea and Bana Tea Company. Uhhhh…. I’ll drink it all one day. I also acquired a crazy amount of oolong, likely from a group oolong buy I participated in. I am happy with less herbals in my stash. The amount of green tea I own I’m not happy about, most of it is matcha from all the matcha reviews I did.
I am also considering breaking up the spreadsheet more into pages for straight and flavored teas so I can visually find them better and drink the latter faster. Flavored teas generally don’t last as long, so they need to be finished sooner.
If you were curious on what all this tea looks like on a shelf, here’s a picture I posted on Instagram not too long ago as a preview.
Oolong Owl’s 2015 Tea Consumption and Arrivals
I drink a lot of tea. I tracked every day how much I drank. I even tracked how much I drank while on vacation. Every mug, tea pot or gaiwan I would put on the scale to weight out how much tea I use. I tracked weight over cups as cups is quite a meaningless metric since we buy tea by weight.
Here’s the data
- Average Amount of Tea drank per day – 18.1 grams
- Average Tea drank per month – 521.8 grams (18oz or 1.1 lbs)
- Most drank tea in a month – December – 637 grams, 21.2 grams a day. This high number was one part “OMG I need to drink all this tea I got!” and another part “So much holiday stress, I’m just gonna drink more tea.”
- Least Tea Drinking Month – April – 419 grams, 14 grams a day. I’m not sure what happened that month.
- There was only ONE day I didn’t drink any tea on – September 2nd. So 364 days in 2015 I drank tea from my stash.
- Total tea consumed in 2015 – 6409 grams / 14.1 pounds. Dammmmmmn!
In scary – I also tracked how much tea came in, purchases and for Oolong Owl. This is an important key to my tracking as I track how much I drink and how much tea arrives – this is helpful in understanding the you aren’t buying more than you consume… in theory that I didn’t follow at all in 2015. I actually won’t post those numbers are they are quite depressing how much tea I’ve acquired in excess despite how much I was able to drink of it combined with what I gave away. More depressing is I still haven’t ordered all the new White2Tea shous yet. I NEED NEW SHOUS!
For 2016…
Well I enjoyed seeing all this data on my tea stash and especially my tea drinking so for 2016 I shall continue with the data!
The Tea Stash spreadsheet is very valuable tool so I highly recommend it if you got a tea stash that you are starting to lose track of. Tracking tea consumption I found beneficial – I will keep up as it’s a good understanding of my drinking habits and purchases. It was an eye opener on how much a month supply of tea really means to me.
Related to tea, but not related to spreadsheets, I really need to get a pumidor. Owl jars take up a lot of space.
