Petra Lindqvist

Useful at work too. 'I will be at reduced capacity tomorrow' lands much better than disappearing for two days with no framing.

Realistically five to ten years of decent storage for a meaningful change, and a young sheng you dislike now is not guaranteed to become one you like later. Age changes character, it does not fix material.

That said, a lot of what you describe is brewing. Young sheng punishes long steeps and full boiling water far more than shou does. Try 5g in 120ml, water rested a minute off the boil, flash steeps of about five seconds. It is a completely different tea brewed gently.

The hollow feeling before lunch is worth taking seriously - young sheng on an empty stomach does that to a lot of people, including me. Eat something first. If it still does it afterwards, this is not your category and there is no shame in that.

Shuffle the order once and see what happens. If your accuracy drops from 92 to 60 when the cards are not in lecture order, you have your answer for free.

Whatever else you do, do not drive. Obvious, but the temptation to get home first is real and the visual field is genuinely compromised.

Subdecks are fine organisationally, they just do not do what you think. Use tags instead - same filtering power, no scheduling weirdness, and you can tag a card two ways.

It is the water, and the move is a much bigger clue than the kettle.

Tea is 99 percent water and mineral content changes extraction dramatically. High calcium and magnesium flattens aroma and gives exactly the thin, chalky quality you describe, particularly with roasted oolong where the aromatics are delicate. New postcode, different treatment works, different cup.

Testing it costs about $3. Buy a bottle of low mineral spring water, ideally something under about 50mg/L of dissolved solids, and brew the same leaf side by side with your tap. If the bottle tastes like the tea you remember, you have your answer in ten minutes.

If it is the water, your options in ascending order of effort are a filter jug (helps mostly with chlorine), bottled low mineral water for sessions you care about, or a remineralising setup with distilled water if you get properly obsessed. Most people stop at bottled.

The kettle only matters if it holds a rolling boil far too long or if it is scaling badly and shedding. Look inside it while you are there.

Everybody misses it. You notice the kettle because you bought it. The water just arrived quietly.

That bit sits and stews at 70C and then joins your next cup. It is a bigger effect than most people believe.

Second steeps of sencha want to be shorter and cooler than people expect, not the same or longer. The leaf is already open and the cell walls are already broken, so extraction is much faster - 10 to 15 seconds at around 70C is a normal second steep, not 30 to 90.

The other half is ratio and vessel. 4g in 250ml is a dilute Western style brew, which forces long steeps, and long steeps on broken leaf pull astringency. If you want several good steeps, go to 5g in a 150ml vessel and drop the times sharply: 60 seconds, then 15, then 30, then 45.

Sencha is also small leaf and there is dust in the bottom of any pot. If you are pouring off the last few millilitres you are drinking the most concentrated and most astringent part. Pour completely dry every time.

Mostly leaf ratio and steep discipline, with a bit of material.

6g in 120ml is light for shou. Seven to eight grams is a more usual gongfu ratio and that extra leaf is exactly what buys you the later infusions. With a lighter ratio you compensate by steeping longer early, which strips the tea in three rounds and leaves nothing for round six.

Try 8g and keep the first three infusions genuinely short, five to eight seconds, pouring immediately. Then extend gradually: 10, 15, 20, 30, 45. If infusion four is thin, you are still steeping too long at one and two.

That said, mid grade shou honestly gives six to eight rather than fifteen. Ten plus infusions is a claim about material, not about technique.

It will look absurd and then it will fill the gaiwan when it opens. That is the correct amount of absurd.

Gaiwan, for your situation specifically.

It is one glazed vessel, it needs no seasoning, it washes in seconds, it does not hold flavour so you can go from a roasted oolong to a black tea in the same session, and it survives living in a box. A clay pot wants to be dedicated to one tea type and wants to dry properly between uses, which it will not do packed away damp in a shared kitchen.

At $40 you can have a decent porcelain gaiwan, a small pitcher and a couple of cups, which is a whole setup rather than one nice pot. The case for clay is real, but it comes later, once you know which single tea you drink enough of to dedicate a pot to.