Need a Tea Mentor

Hello Azzrian: May I suggest following our (TeaEqualsBliss and my) blog? We are the SororiTea Sisters: http://sororiteasisters.com/ And we write about all different types of tea, from Pu-erh to white and even tisanes and all the stuff in between.

I don’t know that there really are “beginner” teas… your palate knows what it likes and that is where you start, and then slowly branch out from there. I also recommend that even if you’ve tried something and found it not to your liking, that you give other types of that same tea a chance (for example, I am not a big Lapsang Souchong Fan, however, since my first less than enjoyable experience with Lapsang Souchong, I have found some that I actually enjoy … so basically what I’m trying to say is that not all teas are created the same.)

I don’t consider myself to be an expert by any stretch of the imagination as I continually learn new things about tea every day … and I’ve been drinking tea for a long time now.

Might I also suggest checking out Tea Trade and some of the teas that are sold there. I have a shop there, and I sell samplings of teas that I’ve tried and reviewed. This one is probably my most popular right now: http://liberteas.teatra.de/store/products/foodzie-box-size-sampler-lots-of-tea-one-small-price/

Other members also sell many different types of tea and tea samples, and samples from different sources can help you determine what you like and where to start branching out to learn more.

Thank you so much for your reply! I am going to check out all of the links right now. I believe I have followed you on Twitter – lol I have no idea what lead me to you there but will for sure check your blog, and other resources offered here.
Oh I can absolutely see how one can be a long time enjoyer of tea yet still have a lot to learn. :)

Oh lord, they have a food box too … let the bank account damage begin…

Well Im not a “connoisseurs” just a lover of tea. First thing to look at is what type of tea you are interested in.
You mentioned pu’er to me i’m still a newbie when it comes to pu’er and the best place for me is Verdant. I would try their Alchemy blends. It is not flavored it is just a mix of one of the pu’ers and spices. They also have Diyi Cornfields Shu, which was the pu’er that made me not be afraid of pu’er. Before Verdant I had a lot of bad experiences with pu’er.
I would look into Adagio, they have great prices and great tea for it. There is also Steepster Select which I’m a member of. It exposes you to great tea and great places to buy it.
These are my go to places:

Verdant Tea-Green,blends,pu’er, and the Laoshan black
oolong-Asha Tea house
Samples-Adagio,Samovar,thepuritea
Flavored-DavidsTea

I would start with Adagio first to see what you like and then go from there. Personally I would stay away from flavored. If you what to get into tea I would taste the tea and not the flavoring that is added. Thats just me though…my two cents :)

It’s great to see new people getting into tea and trying to learn more about it. You could always go with our Tea of the Month Club, Steepster Select (http://member.ly/steepster-select) which is designed to help people just like you get deeper into the world of loose leaf tea (self-promo). :)

I think the best advice I can give is to just be open and willing to try anything. When I started out, I was mostly familiar with flavored teas and thought I wouldn’t like much else. But through my learning process, running Steepster, and running Steepster Select, I’ve learned the teas I thought I would like least in the beginning are actually the teas I like the most now.

I’ll add onto that and say it’s important to be aware of what you’re actually drinking. Don’t just drink to have something to drink, but putting thought and reflection into your tea drinking process can make a huge difference in what you’ll get out of it.

In terms of actual recommendations, I think anything on the first page of the teas section (http://steepster.com/teas) is going to be a winner. Following other people on here should give you natural recommendations too.

Pu-erh might be a little rough for a beginner – I find it to be pretty polarizing because of its extreme earthy flavor. If you’re looking for a pu-erh that caters towards a newer audience, I’d recommend this: http://steepster.com/teas/verdant-tea/19262-2008-diyi-cornfields-single-steeping-shu

Also, here are a few other of my recent favs:
http://steepster.com/teas/norbu-tea/20991-shade-grown-tie-guan-yin-2011-spring-anxi-oolong-tea
http://steepster.com/teas/naivetea/14694-dong-ding-oolong
http://steepster.com/teas/sugimoto-america/23273-sen-cha-fukamushi
http://steepster.com/teas/rishi-tea/133-golden-yunnan

Try doing some swaps! Thats how I first got to try a huge variety from this community. There are some very generous swappers here. Just put up what you are willing to trade and see who’s interested. :). There’s already a swap thread that you can take a look at to see what others are offering. Good luck!

How exciting!

Folks have offered a ton of really great advice. The next step, I think, would be trying to get a group together locally of folks who want to go on this journey with you. Tea (for me, at least) is always much more fun when I drink it with others. It’s also the best way to learn about tea, because everyone gets to talk about whatever it is you’re drinking. When I have to talk about a flavor, I understand it much better. Plus, I get to see things from a different perspective when others tell me what they’re tasting.
For example, when I’m with a group of people I feel comfortable with, the craziest things come out of my mouth. I always end up being the weird one in the group that says, “You know what? This is going to sound weird, but this jasmine tea tastes like you’re eating a strawberry starburst on top of a sunny mountain with pine trees around you and an open container of play-doh in one hand.” But even though that description sounds crazy.. there’s something true in it. And I never would have thought of my tea in that way if I hadn’t been drinking with others and hearing what they had to say.

Where are you? There are probably folks on Steepster who are near your general area. A meet-up can always be arranged via PM’s.. etc (as long as everyone uses common sense, of course). You could also use the PLACES tab to see what physical tea shops are in your area. One of them is bound to be a fun place to hang out with good owners or employees. A couple might even hold events or tastings. Those are always a good place to meet new friends, especially if you can drag along one willing person you already know so you’re not in a corner feeling shy.

Everything’s more fun with friends, and tea is no exception! Steepster a great place for fostering those feelings and connections online, but it’s still the bees knees if you can get some real folks to drink tea together with you.

Whatever happens, don’t “call it a day”… with pu’er or anything else. Tea is one of the coolest plants around, because through processing alone, it can taste like pretty much anything. Awesome and magical!!! No additional flavors necessary!!!
As for pu’er specifically, it is spelled so many different ways.. that’s just because tea people are still arguing about which transliteration system to use. Many are still stuck on Wades-Jiles, which is no longer used in language learning (even for Chinese kids learning their own language).. instead people use pinyin nowadays. But with pu’er, people even use their own various spellings to try and convey those pirate-y sounds to an English ear. If I had to transliterate myself, I’d call it “poo-arrrrrrrrrr” (and then put a picture of a pirate next to it say “YARR!”).
There’s also great recent thread that is collecting recommendations for Starter Pu’er. If you haven’t already checked it out, you should:
http://steepster.com/discuss/2447-best-starter-pu-erh

There’s so much tea in the world. No one will ever try them all or master them. But you can sure have a wonderful time continuing to learn and explore. That’s what we’re all doing. I hope you have fun!!

You’ve got some great advice here, but I’ll add my thoughts as well. I personally started with flavoured tea – first bagged, then loose flavoured tea. From there I have moved onto enjoying pure teas more, but there is still a lot of flavoured tea in my cupboard. This brings me to my point: try to avoid buying a LOT of something until you know if you’ll like it. It doesn’t take long to amass more tea than you could possibly drink, and to potentially end up with many ounces of tea that you don’t even like. Swaps are a good way to get a taste of numerous teas to help you decide whether you want to order more. It has taken me more than 2 years of tea drinking to get away from the obsession with buying lots of tea just in case. I have learned to be selective, and only order what I can handle at a given time. I’ll be enjoying my backlog for ages, at my current rate!

Disclaimer. The following is what I would do. (But not necessarily what I actually did) It may not be an approach that works for you, but it’s what makes immediately more sense to me and looking back, I would rather wish someone had been around to tell me to do it this way in the beginning when I just started exploring the loose leaf. I could probably have saved myself a lot of confusion. You may already know some or most of this, but I decided it best to start from the very beginning anyway rather than assume that you would know.

It doesn’t really matter where you start, but like previous people have said, if you want to explore what tea actually tastes like and what your preferences are when it comes to type and region and those things, save the flavoured stuff for later. Just get some flavoured things that you like and use them for more sort of recreational purposes, you know? When you just want something you know is nice but don’t want to have to think too much about it, if you know what I mean.

No matter whether you choose to start with black or green or oolong or what have you, I would recommend picking one of these and concentrating on that for a while. If for example you decide to start with, say, green tea, get some samples of that, and put the others aside for a bit. At this point I don’t think you have to worry super-much about where you shop, so find a place with a wide selection if you can. Adagio, I think, is good for this exactly because they have such a wide selection.

Get a selection of samples from different regions. If we continue with the hypothetical green tea starting point, I would get a couple of Chinese ones and a couple of Japanese ones to start with. China and Japan are the ‘biggest’ regions when it comes to green tea, although it is produced in a number of other places as well. But these two have the most well known teas, so it should give you a fair idea of what to expect from a green tea.

When you taste them, try to not just pay attention to whether you like it or not. If you can, try to put some words on why you’re having that experience. Does it taste bitter or sweet? Does it taste like flowers or is it slightly salty or does it remind you of something? Don’t be afraid to get it wrong. Some people, when they’re new to Steepster and to trying to describe their experience with a tea, seem to be uncertain of their own experience with it. They seem to think that if they don’t feel what they tasted matches what others found, that they somehow did it wrong or that it’s because of their lack of experience with it. This is not true. Nobody can taste with someone else’s tongue or smell with someone else’ nose, so if you say something has a note of pineapple, for example, in it, nobody can come and say you are wrong. If you found it, it’s there. Even if other people can’t seem to find it or if other people are interpreting the note in question differently. So there is no possible way that you can get it wrong. Tea tasting is not an exact science, so try to avoid falling into this trap of insecurity and trust your senses.

Anyway, getting back to our hypothetical green tea journey. (I like to think of it as exploring, myself. I can just picture myself wearing a tropical helmet and making my way through the tea jungle with a kettle in one hand and a machete in the other. :D) When you experiment with your samples and try to pay attention to which ones you like and which ones you don’t and most importantly why you don’t or do like them, you should start getting an idea of which region is generally more appealing to you. Did you for example tend to prefer the Japanese greens over the Chinese ones? Then that’s your next step on the journey and you can try a wider selection of Japanese green teas, saving the Chinese ones for later.

The key here is to take one thing at a time. Don’t go all out and attempt to try all the teas at once, because you will likely only confuse yourself.

As you become more experienced you will slowly start to develop expectations of what the typical Japanese green should be like. Maybe you find it has a certain quality that other green teas lack or a specific sort of basic flavour profile. This won’t happen overnight and you likely won’t even realise that it did happen until the day you’re sitting there with a cup of tea and finding yourself thinking ‘this tastes Japanese’.

I don’t think anybody can really blindtest fifty random cups and identify them all correctly, except possibly the experienced tea masters whose job it is to make sure a crop is up to the standard of that company and blending it so that the customer will get a consistent flavour profile from that blend, but we can work towards it. And I suspect even those tea masters that quality test blends like that have their specialities as well. It’s a learning process and it never ever stops. So arm yourself with patience.

I want to thank you – what well thought out, entertaining, and very good advice. Actually I have just woken up and read through this one time but it begs for me to read it again when my mind is more clear and the fog has lifted. Which makes me wonder – what will become my regular morning cup of tea. :)
I do not think I could totally give up flavored teas – I am too curious about flavors – so I do like your idea of enjoying those for what they are and focusing on one variety overall. Oh goodness. Now I am not sure which one to begin with. What I think I will do is wait until all my orders arrive and see which I have the most of. I have a feeling it will be green or oolong. Which ever I ordered more of will be where I begin. :)
Thank you!