Hello 2019! With 2018 done, it is time for me to look back on how much tea I drank and own. For readers, a look into someone with a potential tea hoarding problem.
Here is a template of my Tea Stash Spreadsheet! Save a copy and start keeping track of your stash. I highly suggest tracking your tea stash before it gets out of control!
This is the method I use to track my personal tea consumption. Everything tea that I own is weighed, including samples. I weigh every gram of tea I drink.
Oolong Owl’s 2018 Tea Stash Count
593 Teas!
Yes, under 600 again! I admit I went crazy and spent a couple afternoons during winter holidays reorganizing and tossing old teas (2015 matcha, yikes!). Comparing from last year, I went really hard on white teas, as they doubled again! I greatly trimmed down my green and herbal tea stash. I could likely kill off both my Green and Herbal stash to around 5 each, especially if I don’t have many matchas in the queue to review.
49.5% of my stash is puer. The number of puer didn’t change much since last year, but with fewer teas in my overall total, my Black and Oolong amounts dropped instead.
My tea stash is mostly backlogged with samples, in particular, sheng puer and oolong samples. Oolong being the worst samples mostly containing 1-2 session sizes, whereas Puer I have a lot of single ounces minus a session or two. I went pretty hard on drinking down my Oolong samples during my vacation, but Puer stash killing is more difficult.
Oolong Owl’s Tea Stash
Since I took a few afternoons during the holidays to organize, I have a stash photo that isn’t an explosion. It is still cluttered, but there’s no tea on the floor. Not pictured is a small table with 5 boxes of review teas. Despite all these years blogging, I haven’t found a good system for storing teas to be reviewed. I need them separated so I don’t forget or lose them, but I have so many different varieties, they can’t be together. Below is my main big shelf of teas and teacups.
One big change is my pumidor situation. If you followed my Instagram stories, one afternoon I moved my entire sheng stash into its own dedicated, bigger space. I also found a sad white tea cake that got destroyed being stored with the sheng for years. Before the pumidor switch, my old sheng pumidor was so full I had to shove tea in and slam the door, or stuff would fall out. I think another reason my sheng stash is so big (especially those 100grams cakes) is I just hated having to unload the entire pumidor to find something. Now I have plenty of room.
I had also moved my shou out of the wine fridge into another fridge. I had planned to make the sheng take both sides, but this was before I got the new bigger fridge. Right now I put white tea where the sheng was. The white tea is simply shoved in there with no organization.
I added my old IKEA Kalax shelf, however, it is mostly western teapots and empty tins. There’s little organization here other than getting stuff out of the way. There are plans in the future (when other house renovation stuff is done) to completely redo this entire space.
My tea drinking area is still the same cluttered pile of teapots and tea owls. I prefer having most of my pots and gaiwans out so I actually use them. WIthout them visible I settle into using only the ruyao gaiwan rather than clay pots that need seasoning.
Oolong Owl’s 2018 Tea Consumption
- Average tea per day = 18 grams. 18 grams adds up when I matcha in the morning, 2 grandpa sessions or 1 big thermos in the afternoon, then at least one gongfu session around 3pm.
- Average tea per month = 550 grams.
- Most teas drank in a month = April, 717 grams.
April was a trend change as ongoing it has been January as my big tea drinking month. January has always been my tea samples panic crush mode. For April I just simply drank a lot of tea. There was a day, in particular, that was an utter bender at 63 grams, which was me drinking through 10 teas to review in a single setting. May was also a 700 gram month. - Least tea drinking month = November, 428 grams. November again clocks in as less tea drinking. It is strange as even my birthday I only had 7 grams of tea. What is going on with November, I don’t even know.
Total Tea Consumed for 2018 = 6595 grams / 14.5 pounds!
I certainly drank more than 2017, drinking 1 kilo /2 pounds more. I even beat 2016 and 2015 totals.
2018 Tea Goals, Predictions, and Observations
Buying Better Teas. Last year I wanted to buy better quality and was hoping I continued to buy a bit less than the previous year. That failed as I bought a kilo more than last year and paid more for it. What nailed me was the volume I was buying – multiple 250 gram bags of loose leaf white teas, puer cakes, and full bags of Floating Leaves Tea oolongs. I know I spent more in 2018 with the tea prices jumping across the board. I did buy better tea with researched buys at the expense of my own blog pumping out early reviews. For 2019… gosh… I should spend less. Also no more multiple 250 gram bags of white tea for aging. Any more loose leaf white tea will be the death of me.
Flavoured teas are dead. My flavoured tea collection has dwindled to 11 teas, and most of them are expensive stuff from France.
Another reason why I have not many flavoured teas is I’ve simply declined to review them unless they are truly strange or expensive. I just see more and more vendors are just pulling from the same handful of wholesalers. All the more interesting flavoured tea sellers are small indie ones doing it themselves (which is a rare find) but I can never justify their prices when I can get a killer oolong or puer for the same price. Nor do indie vendors have the budget to throw freebies at an owl jerk like me.
Revisiting Teas. I desperately wanted to keep my ReHoots series going.. Well.. there was only one post in 2017 and I planned to do more. Those posts just get thrown to “filler” when I got so many new teas to write about. I’m going to aim for a revisit review every month or two.
More Teaware posts. Teaware has been on my mind lately as I bought a number of good looking pieces in 2018. Uggg, I also spent more money on teaware than what I liked in 2018.
In the end, 2018 was a good tea year. I had some incredible teas and fun times!
