Wonderful advice apache! When you break it down to cost-per-session it makes so much more sense to go with a higher quality pu-erh instead of risking that the cheaper one will get better with age.apache wrote:Yes, I agree, for $150 you could only have one or two not tongs, but I think about this in a slightly different way, I look at the cost per session. A 350g cake would give me well over 50 sessions, and each session, for me, would last at least one day. So this means around $3 per day even if I drink very good pe'urh everyday and drink it to my heart content, normally, for expensive tea likes this, I would only have it every now and then. What could you have for $3 or £2 in UK? A bottle of enjoyable wine would cost around £10 and this would only last no more than 2 days for a wine drinker, a pint of ale costs well over £2 in a pub (alcohol is not my thing). Even a cup of coffee in MacDonald would set you back over a quid. But for £2, you can enjoy very nice pu'erh for the whole day!
Buying cakes which costs around $10 or $15 seems very good value for money, however, not every one of those $10 or $15 cakes you would enjoy to drink. O.K., you might say give a bit of storage time the cakes might improve, but this is by no mean certain. Before you know it, you could easily bought 10 or 20 $10 cakes and only have one or two you like (this actually happened to me), these one of two cakes would almost like costing $100 or $200. For the rest of the tea, there is really not much fun to drink. I'm not trying to say only $100 cake is good enough to drink, but what I'm suggesting is might be instead of having 4 or 5 turning the mill stuffs, just have one good cake instead (you enjoy drinking it now and you knew there is a very high likelihood that if it store well, it would further improve) might not be such a bad idea provided of cause you can afford it.
It's still hard to fight the urge to buy lots of sheng to store away and re-discover years from now!
