>#3 getting an itchy thing in the back of my soft palette, kind of like when
>you eat cheap chocolate

Excellent description, btw.

I have noticed that when pu'er is stored improperly or it has been wet
to make it look older, I will get this scratchy feeling in the back of
my throat instead of the smooth feeling. From my understanding, it was
the style to use wet storage in the past, but people began to realize
how much damage it was doing to the original leaf so people realized
that dry storage is better. Anybody else notice the scratchy feeling
besides me in relating to wet vs. dry storage techniques?

What I mean by "wet" is sometimes the bosses will use a spray bottle
and wet down the tea and let it dry and then repeat...after doing this
a few times, the tea will look older and taste a bit aged. When buying
bing or tuo, look in the hole to see if the tea appears to be a little
"muddy," for lack of a better explanation, and there's a pretty good
chance it's been wet. The bosses will sell these wet teas for much
higher than the dry teas and try to pass them off as being "5-20"
years.

I also noticed that you get the "Se" (bitter sort of acidy aftertaste)
much quicker when drinking wet tea. I think the vendors noticed that
you can get a decently smooth brew for the first 3 or 4 steeps but
after that it gets increasingly bad...if you're ever in a shop and a
vendor refuses to extend the brewing for no reason...it's wet!

As an aside, I hung out in Fangcun Tea Market all day today and came
across a bunch of horrid shops. These young (but pretty) girls were
peddling their pu'er so badly; "this tea is 20 years old"..."it costs
800 yuan"...etc.etc. I wouldn't worry about the American business guys
at all when it came to the rating of tea, I doubt the Chinese business
dudes would even be honest enough to give them anything more than 3rd
grade tea anyway, but that's just my opinion.

>"Bo Nay",

And...I think this one may be Fujian dialect, but correct me if I'm
wrong; I know Po Lay is Cantonese. The dude I dealt with today was
from Fujian and I think I heard him say this a few times when bantering
with his wife about tea in their local dialect.

Mydnight from the frontlines, signing off...