Sale of a 2013 Medium Roast Dong Ding Oolong

It was a nice surprise to re-discover this tea. It was from 2013 winter harvest. For the past several years it was "out of stock", with these several sealed cans left in a mysterious corner of our storage completely due to my own disorganization. It's not a very high grade tea, but of solid quality and was seen as a tea of good value, especially for people who like roasted Dong Ding. (Steepster review page of this tea is here.)  I wouldn't expect the 7 years to add much of "aging effects" because the tea was in the sealed cans with deoxidation packs, standard setting for most Taiwan oolong. When tasting the tea again today, I do feel the tea has more honey flavor than new tea of this type. It could be a mental effect though because there was no side-by-side comparison. Anyway, a nice surprise to find more of this tea after so long time that I had thought it was all gone! 

Now this tea is for sale for $25 per 150g sealed pack, or $50 per sealed can (with 2x150g sealed packs). This is a price lower than its original price 7 years ago. There is no compromise of quality compared with new tea. And if there is any change over the 7 years, I believe the changes are only on the positive side. 

Several years ago, we discontinued this tea when switching another product of Dong Ding oolong of "traditional greener roast" to a more roasted version. But now tasting this tea, I'm thinking I sort of miss it, and maybe it's not a bad idea to consider re-stocking this tea in future. It's a pending decision. I always think our webstore covers too many categories and need to be simplified. However, I never succeeded in simplification. So I'm not sure if we should "worsen" the situation by re-stock a product. So if some of you get this tea, your opinions will be appreciated! 

In addition, another re-discovery is this competition tea First Grade from 2016 winter LGTTS (Lu Gu Tea Farmer's Co-op) assessment. This competition is not a top-notch one, and the threshold is lower than most other competition teas that we carry in Life in Teacup webstore. But this is a First Grade from the competition and is of great values. Besides, we cannot always get First Grade tea from our targeted competitions if we want to stick to the approach of getting tea from a source closest to the producers. I haven't opened any of these cans yet (I only have 3). But I've tasted First Grade tea of LGTTS assessment from other seasons and think it's of very good quality levels. For those who are interested, each sealed can (100g tea) is for sale at $70. 

For more information about various Taiwan competition grades, please temporarily refer to this earlier blog article: gingkobay.blogspot.com/2010/05/competition-grades-of-taiwan-oolong.html

I say "temporarily refer to" because this article was written more than 10 years ago and would need some annotation (I will try to do it soon). For example, nowadays, a lot of the competitions (including some of the oldest ones) expand the amount of each competition batch and it's no longer 27 lb. Besides, over the past several years, there are even more competitions. 

By the way, from time to time, I notice there are some tea vendors who copied my blog articles word-by-word on their webpages. I personally don't care much about it and usually wouldn't make the effort to chase after them. But sometimes, for example, when they copied a 2010 article for people to read in 2021, the information might no longer be up to date and is not necessarily accurate. That's a different layer of problem.  

For the above, US domestic shipping charge would be $5 flat. For Canada and other parts of the world, I actually don't have much idea about what the recent USPS policies and prices are (they changed a lot recently) and would look up upon request. 

Please email me at gingkoheight@gmail if interested. 

By the way, one more advertisement. I'm having some teapots for sale on ebay (www.ebay.com/usr/gingko_seto). Most of them are single-copy teapots or some with too few copies to justify the work of putting up a webpage for them. Shipping cost on ebay items is high because USPS shipping nowadays could easily go above $10 for anything over a pound. Please feel free to ask for tea samples and/or free yixing teacups to make the shipping more worthwhile. 

Thank you and happy new year!