When you walk into a tea shop and face the dazzling array of tea products, are you already confident and decided on which tea to buy? Or are you planning to let the salesperson make recommendations before deciding what tea to purchase? Or have you simply made up your mind and are psychologically prepared to "pay tuition fees"? Let's discuss how to choose tea products here.
We should ask ourselves - do we clearly understand why we're buying tea? Are you planning to treat it like stock for investment, or as artwork to decorate your home? Are you planning to collect it anticipating future aging, or to drink it immediately after returning home?
If treating it as an investment, then besides quality, you might need to consider the total quantity of that tea product, current market response, the tea product's recognizability, and storage conditions.
If treating it as artwork for decoration, then the tea product's appearance, shape and color, historical significance, etc., become the main considerations.
If buying for collection, expecting future transformation and aging, waiting for the emergence of the increasingly excellent aged aroma and tea flavor before carefully savoring it, then you must carefully distinguish everything from tea quality to processing techniques and storage, so you won't wait many years only to end up disappointed.
If for immediate consumption, then you need to pay special attention to tasting sessions at the tea shop, your body's immediate reaction, and personal taste preferences, among other issues.
Generally speaking, given the current market situation where aged tea cakes are hard to find, most tea enthusiasts mainly follow the practice of drinking aged tea while consuming ripe tea and collecting new tea. On one hand, this allows the continuous transformation of new tea products over years to accompany tea drinkers through long periods, bringing unexpected surprises in daily life due to the tea's transformation; on the other hand, in real life, there's also sufficient ripe tea and adequately aged tea to regularly accompany them, satisfying cravings.
Selecting tea products should start with tasting. But which tea product should you choose to taste? Unless you're a regular customer, tea shop owners or salespeople will generally ask three questions: Raw tea? Ripe tea? Tea from what year; do you prefer powerful and strong tea, or smooth and mild taste? After you answer these one by one, the tea shop owner will roughly have an idea and decide which tea to offer for tasting.
In this general classification, if you want mild and smooth new ripe tea, since such tea products can be found everywhere and the price is affordable for everyone, then there probably won't be significant risks. But if you want powerful aged raw tea, then it becomes full of interest and challenge - the tea shop owner will likely test your "foundation" - your tea tasting skills. In other words, if you want to drink such aged tea or powerful raw tea, it might depend on the tea drinker's skill. Only those with sufficient tea tasting ability will have the opportunity for the tea shop owner to bring out such tea products to match, while those with insufficient tea tasting foundation will probably only get to drink ordinary raw and ripe tea, returning disappointed.