I’ve just arrived back in England after spending the past three months in Asia. A lot has happened since we left for China in March. We’ve found and pressed four puerh teas, which should be available in around a month & also found a few aged puerh teas and received some more Yixing teapots, kettles and tea jars which I’ll be listing online in the next few days.
Our big news is that we’ve decided to move house… to Malaysia!
Over the past few years we’ve been appreciating more and more the effect that the climate in Malaysia has on ageing puerh tea. The high temperature and level of humidity seems to provide an excellent climate for ageing puerh tea at a good speed, while allowing the tea to retain it’s vitality and character. The resulting Malaysian stored tea seems to exhibit a complexity and depth that is rarely found in Taiwanese, Hong Kong or Mainland China stored tea.
We’ve long thought about renting a storage unit there to age our puerh tea, but while visiting this Spring a few conditions came together and we decided that we’d like to live there… for a few years at least.
So… I’ve arrived back in the UK and over the next couple of months will be boxing up and shipping our possessions and tea in a container to Malaysia. For our personal lives this will be a big change, and quite different from living in Cornwall. For The Essence of Tea, it will also be a big change. We’ll be much closer to China and be able to make more regular trips, but also we’ll be able to spend more time finding and exploring the aged tea available in Malaysia and Taiwan. Hopefully this will bring a lot more diversity and many new offerings to our website.
The shipping of our teas will be done from Malaysia. For those in the UK, the shipping will be a bit more expensive and the wait will be a little longer – hopefully the increased selection of teas will compensate somewhat for this. For those in Europe, the US and the rest of the world hopefully the shipping price will be comparable (we’ll subsidise it a bit) and the delivery time will hopefully be somewhat comparable.
We’ll ship our 2014 Puerh teas directly to Malaysia and hopefully make these available and begin shipping orders from Malaysia around the beginning of August.
It will be a big change for us. In the meantime I’ve got a lot of packing to do!
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