This is a rather long read, if you want to just know more about my teaching experience check out the Teaching page.
As I re-read what I’ve written below, one theme pops up over and over that moved me through my journey: knowing it’s impossible to figure everything out by oneself in one lifetime and that someone must exist who knows a lot about Tea and that they could teach it to me, both by drinking together the real old tea and real ancient tree puerh and also by pointing out qualities and defects as we drink.
I’ve had a very serious personal practice: even though I had a different job for some of these 10 years learning about tea was still what I spent most effort and time on. And yet I knew it wouldn’t be enough, indeed you see some many people online that have never spent time with serious teachers and they have all sort of weird ideas that are easily disproven by drinking tea with someone else with half a clue. But they never try to meet someone that can show them out of their delusions, and keep on writing things online as if they know.
It’s both sad and vaguely endearing, this modern belief that one can figure things out by oneself without learning from others, and that one can somehow learn about something so physical as tea by reading blogs and books.
The level of information in the western (and also Chinese, I’m told) puerh online sphere is so low it’s almost a joke – I could easily tell this by how fashion driven it is so I directed my attention elsewhere and I resolved I wouldn’t hold any views about tea without it being open to being changed, indeed I actively searched to be corrected.
I searched high and low for the most expert holders of knowledge (and real highest quality after tea), and eventually found the ones, most notably Lim Ping Xiang in Kuala Lumpur, who is very likely the most experienced living person in all Chinese tea (especially Puerh, Liu bao and Yancha), and is certainly credited to be so at least in the whole of Malaysia and by many in mainland China and Taiwan.
There may be someone else that I don’t know about that is even more experienced, but it’s getting less and less likely with the years passing as we keep on searching and digging deeper for anyone who might know something we don’t. While we now met and count among our friends and sources quite a few people with really impressive collections of verified real stuff (old tea or ancient tree puerh) and we love drinking tea with them, no one comes close to him in both skills and teaching.
Here goes a brief history of my first 10 years of Puerh, and why I am who I am today:
The beginning (2016-2017)
I’m very sensitive to caffeine, I would get anxious very easily with it. If I drank even a single tea bag, the next day I would feel weak from lack of caffeine. So I never drank any tea, let alone coffee. I was vaguely aware of the tea ceremony but even though I used to meditate a lot, I was never interested in tea.
But it was my ex girlfriend’s birthday (21st February 2016) and she was interested, so on we went to a tea ceremony held by Nick Dilks, an Englishman who was a Triratna Buddhist Order member, had lived in Taiwan with Aaron Fisher (Wu De) of Global tea hut and had a business selling tea called “Living tea UK”.
My ex liked it, but my mind was so still during it in a way that I only rarely reached in meditation without tea, and of course because of the Qi of the tea I didn’t feel anxious at all and had no energy crash. I was completely hooked.
I was served a 2004 Puerh (might’ve been a Changtai Yiwu cake, IDK). I got some of it, went to a charity shop to buy some rice bowls (with handles!) and started having ‘leaf in a bowl’ tea daily, and I never stopped since.
The level of stillness I felt daily was amazing, I would have tea for an hour (being still between bowls), then meditate for an hour. Pretty quickly, I stopped separating the two activities and had a long tea sit for 2 hours each morning, looking at the sea in my Brighton flat.
Global tea hut (2016-2017)
I went to Barcelona and the Spanish mountains respectively for a series of classes and a retreat about the way of tea, I was very moved by these and I kept on following GTH, read Aaron Fisher books, generally followed the way of tea he taught.
Then I went to visit the actual hut in Taiwan in February 2017: I didn’t like some of the things I saw, I felt very disillusioned (and rather heart broken really).
I came home to the news of Nick (my first ‘tea teacher’, who introduced me to tea) having died in my absence, I was very upset by this as well. Both events prompted some serious soul searching about the role of tea in my life.
Tea as meditation (2016-2019)
Not having a tea tradition or teacher to learn from proved somewhat difficult, but as I was focusing my efforts on my Buddhist tradition, I simply had tea in silence with meditation for many years, honing my feel for it and laying the foundation for what came later.
By now, I still had not much idea of what really was quality in tea, though I could recognise Qi suitable for meditation very well.
I did one more tea trip to Taiwan and later in 2019 I spent most of the year in Asia visiting Kuala Lumpur a lot besides Taiwan, coming back just before covid started in UK in march 2020.
It was around this point that I decided I would only focus on Puerh, because I wanted to know at least one thing really, really well (as close as possible to knowing it completely).
in 2017, I wanted to buy a small flat/house for myself, but through various adventures I ended up looking at the house on a hill (more far away from the centre of Brighton than I wanted) but as soon as I entered the living room, saw the perfect view from the big windows it was clear to me: “This room is a tea room, I need to buy the house around it”. So I did, and I then tried to figure out how to use the rather large house around the tea room.
At first it was a spiritual community for a few years (4-5 of us would live there and practice tea ceremony meditation each morning at 7am), today of course it’s my family home and 3 humans (me, my wife Una, and our daughter), 2 pets, our tea office and storage and two tea rooms all the space is well used!
Enlightenment Tea (2020-2021)
After many years where I really didn’t want to sell tea because I thought it would be too distracting, I finally realised that people came to the meditation tea ceremonies I held, had a very deep experience, but then never really practiced it in their daily life. It became obvious to me that I could do the most benefit to people by helping them to have their own daily tea practice – sourcing tea and teaware for them was the best I could do for them.
At first, this was rather difficult, it was a drastic change of ways, but I later settled into it and nowadays there’s no conflict in my mind about the fact that I can have tea with a friend and they may or may not buy some, I’m not motivated by sales and my mind feels clean (if it wasn’t like this, I couldn’t do this at all!).
The tea ET sold was all about it being suitable Qi for meditation, it never made any money (in fact it lost it), but it was just a more altruistic effort while my income still came from software engineering consulting.
At the end of this period if where I first met Una, who first came for a tea ceremony, quickly became my wife and tea partner. It would be a few years before her own skills were as developed as today, but the started helping with packing, translating, accompanying on tea trips and generally learning tea with me daily.
Online trolls (2021-?)
It turns out that when you’re visible online, you’ll get people both loving and hating you for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with you, quite like people hate/love politicians and celebrities. Who knew? Well I could’ve known, but I had been functionally an hermit for all my life and utterly disinterested in gossip, so I didn’t really know until it touched me.
I was so utterly confused by this, I still am but at least I’ve had years to adjust to it and find it no more puzzling than many other things I see around me and intellectually I get it: when your life sucks, criticising someone else by projecting your shortcoming on them might make you feel slightly better. But still, it seems so obviously self-defeating when it’s seen for what it is so… I’m still frankly quite puzzled.
I heard many fantastical stories about myself, from being a flat earther, to having committed insurance fraud by setting fire to the cabin where all of my best friends belongings were, to have crappy quality overpriced tea (strictly by people who never tried any), etc etc 🙃
Puerh.uk (Dec 2021-current)
At first, we started by selling popular Taiwanese “boutique brand” aged teas and a few aged or semi-aged sheng puerh only, quite a few 2000s factory cakes too (which we now hardly do, because they’re mostly plantation material).
But we quickly we settled more and more into one single objective: sourcing as high quality as possible Puerh, from very old tea all the way to a single huge king tree.
The 2014 Green Mark MengSa was our first Puerh.uk branded cake and the 2011/2016 Gold Mark Gua Feng Zhai is both our best reviewed tea ever and the tea that gave rise to me thinking about Puerh.uk at the beginning.
After the borders opened again after covid, I started spending a lot of time in Asia: Taiwan and Malaysia mostly and later a bit of mainland China, HK and singapore too.
Meeting Chen Huay Yuan/Chen Yuan Hao (Dec 2022)
The first dramatic switch was appreciating young sheng puerh, and it was only possible because I finally met someone doing real 100% pure ancient tree Puerh. Our first meeting in Tainan (south Taiwan) was very momentous, we decided I would help represent their teas in the west and they even came to hold a session in the UK in 2025.
Besides the many great new teas by CYH, Chen Huay Yuan is notable to be a large part of the reason why the world drinks ancient tree puerh today. While Lu Li Zhen was the original creator of the legendary ’94-’97 ZhenChunYaHao, Chen Huay Yuan is who made a lot of the actual early ancient tree tea and popularised in the 2000s, when no one in mainland China (and almost no one outside it) cared about ancient tree puerh at all.
Teas like 2001 SXXH Manzhuan and 2002 CYH Yiwu pure gushu are what gives us confidence of how well ancient tree puerh can age. We are the only shop online to ever offer these cakes (and at a price about half as they sell for in mainland China) and we are very proud to do this, as drinking these is essential to understand ancient tree and an experience a serious sheng puerh drinker can’t miss.
Meeting Lim Ping Xiang (2023)
As mentioned earlier, Lim Ping Xiang is likely the most expert living person in the world about chinese tea. Since he’s retired and doesn’t have a phone or way to contact him he’s very hard to get ahold of, but I went to KL over and over until I managed to track him down. To my great fortune, we’ve met 10s of times since then, I really wouldn’t know nearly as much as I do without him.
While he’s not interested very interested in young puerh, his knowledge of old tea is unparalleled and so his collection from which he teaches from: very often when I drink his tea I get very angry at about just how good his teas are and how impossible is to source something like this. Later I calm down and I just resolve to strive to get as close as we can… and I think we do a pretty great job, but still the bar is set so high it’s very hard in the moment to accept it.
Not only that: he can also teach extremely well! Seeing him teaching me, Una and others is what gave me confidence that understanding what is good quality tea can be taught relatively easily to someone with an open mind, though surprisingly most tea drinkers are not actually ready, they’d rather hold on to stories rather than learn something new.
While I’m nowhere near his level (not of skills nor of teaching), I hope to do it some justice, and I am told this is so, after meeting people for even just one single class they say they understand so much better (and I can confirm that they do). I intend to teach more this year, as I feel more and more confident these skills can be taught.
Meeting our Chinese partner and producing the Benchmark series (2023-2024)
Another fateful meeting in 2023 was our chinese partner, and trying his gushu. We asked for the best Yiwu he had and he took out an early FengHuangWo.
If you tried this tea you know how otherworldly it is but hopefully you had the benefit of trying our other benchmark teas and maybe some other real Yiwu gushu so you can probably tell, but for us it was really a shock, and it took us a few months to strike the great partnership we have today.
Nowadays, we’re widely recognised to be the only ones sharing benchmark quality sheng puerh online or even offline (outside of private circles).
Digestion issues (2024-2026)
From April 2024, I had a really strong case of acid reflux, particularly when drinking tea.
After trying chinese, tibetan, western medicine at length and all sorts of medicine and lifestyle adjustment and nothing really working that well… I finally figured out it was only caused by stress, and particularly an inner conflict between two parts of me (one driven to learn and do as much as possible, one driven to rest and prevent overwhelmed).
To prove it, I undertook a couple of very relaxed periods – indeed, all the reflux issues went away, even though I kept on drinking tea and not changing my lifestyle to adapt for it much.
At its peak, I had to make a lot of lifestyle adjustments (very bland diet, not lying down during the day, digestion walks, etc etc) and could not drink tea at all without triggering some level of reflux.
Nowadays it’s under control… unless it’s a stressful period, where I get hit by reflux pretty strongly again.
Una going to Yunnan on her own (2025)
As a result of the above, I couldn’t go to Yunnan for picking season in spring 2025, so Una (my wife and partner in puerh.uk, see above) went on her own!
In winter 2024-2025 she went to several classes with Master Lin in KL and we did a lot of tastings together where I shared what I looked at to decide what’s good quality tea over and over.
I’m very happy to say she’s now as skilled as I am in terms of judging quality of young sheng puerh! This also makes me very confident about it being teachable to anyone who really wants to learn.
Of course old tea can also be taught, and she’s very proficient at that too, but the availability of very old teas (1900s-1950s) is much more limited so while we drank a lot when travelling with our various friends and teachers, many of which have big quantities of them and don’t mind drinking them even casually, we can’t do this learning at home so easily as we don’t have as much in our own collection (understandably, the top stuff is £100+/g).
Holistic vision
Indeed, I realise one of the advantages we have is how we’re trained and experienced in both young ancient tree and old tea, we’ve drank it extensively, can identify real ones, good storage, know how tea will age and at the same time produce the highest standard possible of ancient tree puerh. This is a unique combination of skills that gives us a very deep understanding into how the tea we produce will age.
We have tried tea from really a lot of different storages and picked a specific building in southern Taiwan (we tried teas stored there for 10+ years, including the Gold Marks Gua Feng Zhai and Lao Ban Zhang) where we now hold about £1 million worth of Puerh and old tea, including some for customers that are aging it there.
Also in terms of brewing technique and teaware for brewing, being very clear that what we care about is only offering teaware that enhances the quality of Puerh (and old tea) also makes us a unique source for teaware and simplifies a lot our sourcing. As an example: I’m writing this from Qinzhou (hometown of Nixing clay), where Una has strong family connections with Nixing makers – we don’t offer Nixing because it’s not as good as Yixing, even though what a shop owner would normally do is to make it fit into one’s system because it would be easy/high margin to sell.
The future
As I write from a hotel room in said Qinzhou I reflect I’ve been travelling a lot, my health has somewhat suffered (the acid reflux is not serious now, but was very scary when I didn’t know it was stress related only). My relationships have not suffered too much but that’s because of the patience and kindness of the other people (and pets) involved, constantly waiting for me to come back home from some tea adventure or other.
One makes choices, some of which are more conscious than others, certainly in my wish to learn as much about puerh as I could there was also a significant amount of desperate need for validation (isn’t this the story of all successful people?). But also a genuine curiosity which, combined with autistic tendencies, made it very satisfying for me to have a single focus to put all my energy on, to be extremely single minded about.
After I reflect on everything I wrote this is what I’m left with: The obsession with learning about Puerh got us very, very far, but perhaps it’s possible to do it in a healthier, more balanced way?
I think already the fact that I’m thinking about it, means the answer is yes, it is possible. And as I look on the last 10 years I don’t exactly have strong regrets for what I’ve sacrificed to be where I am now, but neither would I want to keep on doing it exactly in the same way: I want to spend more time with my family, my pets, in my beautiful home, and meeting people for tea face to face (and one-on-one in online puerh tea classes) rather than focusing on selling online only.
If you read or skimmed so far thank you – and here’s to the next 10 years, I hope you can be part of it.
Yes, you! (Book class here: Online puerh tea classes)