Rotating Stock / Storage

Well I usually tin any tea that is over an ounce, but we have a lot of tins. I figure the smaller amounts will get used fast enough they won’t be harmed by staying in the bag. Besides I find getting teas out of tins easier than getting teas out of bags.

I haven’t gotten many hmm naked teas yet. Generally we try to get samples now so storing them is easy. If I was in the position to have two different harvest of the same tea, I think I would go with different tins. It’s my understanding they can taste different due to environmental pressures and such. So, if it was a tea I really enjoyed, separate tins with harvest dates on the labels.

We have a tin with a mix of teas. All naked teas we didn’t think made the cut for the staple and we don’t drink them much. They go into the FrankenTea tin, destined for iced tea this summer.

I think if we were ever getting to the point where we might have multiple years of the same tea, I’d want to clear out the ‘stock’ of the older teas to make room for the new. As excited as I may be to try the new stuff… I’d want to hold off.

Knock out the fannings and dust, air them out a couple of days and reuse them for whatever I just bought . Except for strongly scented teas like Lapsong Souchang or Earl Grey, they stay in their own tins. And I keep my Pu-erh in a larger double covered clay jar big enough for a bing cha. That gets recycled too, but much less often.

Generally I don’t keep anything in tins unless it’s expensive and/or I have more than 2 oz. of it. There just isn’t enough room in my apartment and the envelopes are easy to lie flat. Pu-erhs, I just keep them in a cardboard box. I generally wash and reuse my tins and just slap a new label on there with masking tape. I know that is not very glamorous but it saves money/aluminum/whatever

I have basically 3 different types of cannisters. Silver colored ornate cylinders I bought over the years at Ten Ren Tea; burgundy rectangular metal cannisters that various purchases came in from Fang Gourmet Tea and then a cacophony of different sized and colored tins I got at other times which for some reason I liked and kept. Although I usually go in cycles as to what I’m drinking, I still usually keep about a dozen or so different types of loose tea around to meet my moods.

I never put labels on the tins though, part of my tea-geek fun every morning is to pick up one of silver or burgundy metal canisters and see if I can figure out which tea is inside just by the sound as I gently shake it. Each type of leaf has its distinctive sound.

I have a ton of cannisters – the plain silver branded ones from Teavana, various washi paper ones from Teavana, little circular ones from Adagio, thin metal ones from Art of Tea, little squat ones from DAVIDs… the list goes on. I try to tin teas if I can, especially since I have SO much tea that I’m worried it’ll go stale if I don’t. I’m sort of at the point where I tell myself that I have to buy the tin if I’m getting more than 50g of a tea, and then I fight with myself about whether I want to pay for the tin or not… XD. But I’ve got a wire rack that has everything on it, and I have a giant oval tin from Teavana that’s designated as my “sample” tin.