Puerh tea retail in Los Angeles area
I’m in LA for a week. Want a tea retailer which has good selection of bings and tuos, and where they will prepare a sample for us of the one(s) we’re interested in before we decide what to buy. Any suggestions?
Im in vegas, and LA isnt so far out of the way that a future trip is out of the question, so very interested as well.
whoa 4 year old topic back from grave.
AFAIK it is just Wing Hop Fung that has puer.
I never got around to going there when I lived in LA, so I dunno if they do tastings. Not many tea options in Los Angeles area really.
Bana Tea Company is a local online seller, no physical store but her puer is excellent. I know she attends the LA Tea Festival that was in December and has tastings and classes there.
There was also some tea tastings via Teabook in LA in the past.
I don’t have much to add about pu’er options in LA, but might mention the more general point that Tea Chat is also a good place to check related to such things since it’s a searchable tea forum. A number of clicks in it looks like Wing Hop Fung is what mentions there would point towards. For someone really into the endeavor asking people on there from LA by message could also work, but that’s already came up in this discussion too, sort of. What that search looks like:
http://www.teachat.com/search.php?keywords=pu%27er+los+angeles
It is. There isn’t really any focus on them as a vendor though; the posts and discussion are by individual members. As with any discussion forum the level of activity comes and goes a bit but the searchable aspect makes it potentially useful even if it goes quieter. It goes without saying that vendor options change over time, so that a really complete discussion of shops in an area could be well out of date a few years later.
Interesting. I may check it out one day. I’ve never been a fan of adagio teas myself, but if there are other vendors it may be useful.
I’ve heard good things about http://teatra.de/ as well. I made an account there ages ago, and have always meant to investigate more. I keep forgetting!
I had looked around teatra.de a little at one point as well but didn’t stick with it. There is a discussion area there as well but it had seemed more a collective enterprise for hosting vendor sites or blogs. Tea Chat is just an ordinary forum, in the same way that this Discussion area functions as the same type of thing, just structured more typically into sub-sections. The culture is different there than here, probably the kind of thing I shouldn’t go into detail about since whatever I say could be wrong or judgmental, but since I’m short on reservations I will. Members there seem to be older, quite experienced tea drinkers, in general, good resources for input but giving up a bit in the open, learn as a group feel to discussions here.
I probably should mention that I founded and help run an international-themed tea group on Facebook as well, with plenty of members from within the US as well. As tends to happen with Facebook groups versus discussion areas like this one it’s a bit quieter, or maybe they only seem that way due to the other post format groups there follow, with only the latest posts bubbling to the top of a running list: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1647370545538088/
I’d add reddit/tea is a good resource too. There has been many questions on the LA tea scene there, with the same answer. There isn’t one unless it is bubble tea or afternoon tea.
Man, I wish there was more of scene in LA. American Tea Room has good ripe Mini cakes. They also have a raw, but I can’t remember what I thought of it. I had it when I was Young in my Puer journey. They serve everything western style.
https://www.americantearoom.com/
I did get to taste some Bana Puer at the LA tea festival in December. It was great chatting with the Owner. Super nice and knowledgeable.
Denong tea has a local location in Pasadena. Not sure if it’s open yet. Their black tea is great! https://www.denongtea.com/
There are unfortunately very few local sellers of puerh just about anywhere in the country unless you are lucky to live near someone like Crimson Lotus Tea or someone like that. There is always Purepuer in California, but I believe they are in San Francisco. Besides, often times a local store doesn’t get a horribly good price when buy puerh so they then have to mark up the puerh to the point you don’t want it anyway. An example is a local tea store on Long Island. They had one raw puerh cake for sale. They wanted $185 for it, but they could not tell me why it was so valuable so I passed. Most likely it was something that an online seller would sell to you for less than $100 at least. Local stores will also not always store their teas correctly. One local store near me had ripe puerh, raw puerh, and hei cha all together in one basket, not stored separately as would be proper. And it was not that the owner was not an expert in tea, she just wasn’t an expert in Puerh tea and didn’t realize that storing the different types of tea together means the flavors would mingle. An online source of puerh will almost always be superior to a local unless like I say you are very lucky.
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