LIBRARY

Chajnyj Pjanica began as a Telegram channel and a suitcase of puerh. A few of us were tired of watching Europe drink dust out of a bag while the good leaf never left the mountains.

We are not a tea house, and not an importer working off a supplier’s price list. We are the people who take the bus out to the village, sit drinking with the farmer for five hours, and leave with two kilos if it was good — and with nothing if it wasn’t.

We buy at the source. Not from a warehouse in Guangzhou, but where the leaf was picked — most often in Yunnan, from people whose names we can tell you.

Every harvest is tasted blind, next to last year’s. If a tea is not better than what is already on the shelf, we don’t take it, however handsome the cake.

So the shelf is never permanent. Good leaf runs out, and that is how it should be.

Ceremony is optional. Quality is not. Brew gongfu with a timer and a scale, or throw five grams in a mug — the tea we carry survives both.

We don’t tell legends about emperors, and we don’t sell age instead of taste. If a cake is twenty years old and mediocre, we will say so. If a young sheng is three years old and wonderful, we will say that too.