A Year in Tea: 2025
I started keeping serious notes on tea in January 2025. By December I had filled two small notebooks and ordered from eleven different vendors across the Netherlands, Germany, and the UK. I drank approximately 340 distinct sessions — I stopped counting exactly in September, which tells you something about the trajectory.
Here's what I actually think, at the end of it.
What I drank most
Morning: Sencha, almost every day. Specifically a Yabukita from a Shizuoka farm I found through a Japanese import cooperative in Amsterdam. Reliable, pleasant, never exciting, which is exactly what I want before 9am.
Afternoon: Rotated heavily. January through April was mostly Taiwanese oolongs. May I got into Wuyi rock oolongs and that lasted until August. September through November I had a white tea phase — specifically a three-year-aged Shou Mei that I bought too much of and will be drinking for another year. December: Shu Puerh, which I didn't expect to like and now can't stop thinking about.
Weekend mornings: Gyokuro when I have patience. The session with the highest sensory return per minute of attention, if you're willing to use 60°C water and wait.
The best thing I tasted
A Da Yu Ling oolong from the 2024 winter harvest, bought from a small Taiwanese vendor at a specialty market in Utrecht in March. Da Yu Ling is grown above 2600m — the highest elevation commercial tea growing in Taiwan — and the winter harvest has a particular cold-weather sweetness that I'd read about but hadn't believed until I tasted it. Floral, thick, an aftertaste that lasted twenty minutes. I bought 50g and rationed it through the spring. I have 8g left and I'm thinking about it.
The biggest mistake
Brewing gyokuro at 80°C in March because I didn't want to wait for the water to cool. Three times in a row, convinced the bitterness was the tea's character rather than my impatience. The fourth time I waited. It wasn't the tea.
This applies to other things.
What I'd do differently
Spend more time with fewer teas. I covered a lot of ground this year, which was useful for orientation, but there were teas I should have stayed with longer. Understanding a good oolong through ten sessions over a month is different from understanding it through three sessions in one week.
I also bought too much from vendors I found through recommendations without first ordering a small sample. Most of them were fine. Two were not, and I now have 80g of a heavily roasted Da Hong Pao that tastes like an ashtray at every temperature I've tried.
What I'm carrying into 2026
More Shu Puerh. More patience with the gaiwan — I've gotten better but I'm still rushing the first infusion. A proper chawan, eventually. And this site, which I started in November as a way to organize my notes and which has turned out to be a useful discipline in its own right: writing about what you tasted forces you to pay attention while you're tasting it.
The year ends with more questions than it started with, which seems correct. I don't know what Shu Puerh is doing to me biochemically and I'm not sure I want to find out. I don't know why the third infusion from a good High Mountain oolong tastes better than the first. I don't know why the Dutch theepauze and the Japanese chado, which seem opposites, feel like they're pointing at the same thing.
Next year, probably more questions.