We had our second Dayre Tea ParTEA yesterday! The tea parTEA (really loving the pun here so sorry for the overuse) started off as a way to meet online friends and enjoy tea at the same time. And of course, some of us were also hoping that by bringing our teas to the parTEA, we could reduce our tea collection to make room for more.

Spoiler alert: We always end up exchanging tea so there’s either a very small reduction in our collections or we end up with slightly more tea than before.

Our second tea parTEA was hosted by the lovely Cherine, who is basically my Chinese tea shifu right now. This is part of the teas she brought, which are basically the single-source teas:

And the rest of the teas, which are the blended and flavoured teas. Only four of the tins are mine and the rest are hers!

And her set up! She brought enough teapots that we could brew several types of tea at the same time. We were hoping this would let us try more teas but even after almost four hours, we finished probably less than half the teas.

There was even a little snack corner although like the first time, this ended up largely ignored.

And these are the teas that Yvonne brought! Her teas are notable because she actually managed to give away all her teas!

I brought back some

I think the most anticipated (and my favourite) tea of the day was this one:

This is a gyokuro (最上出品玉露) made solely from Uji tea leaves from 三星園上林三入本店 (みつぼしえん かんばやしさんにゅう ほんてん; mitsuboshien kanbayashisannyuu honten). From what I can see on their website, this is their second highest grade of gyokuro. The gyokuro tasted amazing and everyone loved it.

Mitsuboshien Kanbayashisannyuu Honten seems like a really interesting shop too, since they were founded in the Taisho era and are currently headed by the 16th generation of the family. If I ever get to go to Kyoto, I must remember to check out the shop.

And we remembered to take a group photo yesterday! I’m really glad to have met these group of lovely people who can geek out about tea with me. Looking forward to the next parTEA!