Tea Blogging Retrospective; Four Busy Years

I just took about three weeks off blogging (Tea in the Ancient World), maybe the longest break in the past 4 years, over which time I wrote 451 posts. It’s a good time to explain what I’ve learned and to question why I posted that much.

Originally, writing about tea was part of exploring social media and online groups – checking if blogging was a good fit. I was just messing around for the first two or three years — starting in 2013 — and at some point shifted gears related to exploration. T Ching helped prompt that: I started doing interview and research posts; moving beyond the review form starting just over four years ago. It’s appropriate that an interview with one of my favorite vendors, Cindy Chen of Wuyi Origin (a business started well after that) was my second post.

There probably never was any one point. I liked to write, and kind of needed a hobby; and prior interests like cooking, wine, exploring Buddhism, and outdoor sports had cycled through. I’d already been drifting towards deeper tea exploration even six years ago.

Lots of tea exposure worked out. My own style of reviewing developed, conveying experience in more detail than most people would probably want to read. That can help me place what I experienced of teas years ago if I factor in changes in communicating experience and the shift in expectations and exposure. Research posts covered themes like caffeine level, fluoride risk (right, it’s in tea), pu’er storage concerns, mineral content in water as a factor, and lighter topics like why it doesn’t work well to microwave water for tea. Interviewing producers has been nice, and studying cultivar background; reviewing processing inputs hasn’t gone as well. Conducting group tastings has been more of a miss than a success.

To be concluded in Tea Blogging Retrospective; Four Busy Years – Part 2