Introductions are in order

Tecnorobo? PBR? Who is he?

Well, Hello.

You’ve wound up here either by accident, because I’ve shared this blog with you, or because it’s five years down the road and somehow I’ve become popular. Thanks for being here. This will likely be the hardest entry I write because I’m not expecting regular visitors. That means I’m writing this entry for you and whoever else might be reading. I do suppose it’s as good of time as any to let you know that I won’t be writing this blog for you, but for me. We’ll get into that later though. It’s time to introduce myself.

Tecnorobo – that’s the online username I’ve been using since 5^th grade. Yes, it is misspelled, odd, and feels like it had been crafted by a preteen. That is because it was. Why not technorobot? Why not something else now that you’ve grown up? Unfortunately, I guess I’ve never been able to drop the name. It is like an unfortunate tattoo – something that follows me everywhere I go, and I can’t get rid of it unless I make an effort to have it removed. At this point, it has been there too long and has too many memories while wearing it to justify removing it. If you look up tecnorobo on google, you may be “lucky” to find various gaming accounts, forum accounts where I review cigars and whisky, or even when I played paintball. More recently you’d find the name in discord where I chat about tea with friends. That is all to say that tecnorobo, for better or worse, is not going anywhere. So now you know the origins of tecnorobo.

But what of PBR? Those are my initials. Paul “Blake” Russell. It is another name you could look up on google but it’d only lead you to a boring linked-in profile, Instagram where I share too many pictures of my kid, or articles I wrote around ten years ago about bass fishing. That’s right: I used to write about something almost as boring as myself, and I even got paid to do it. So now you have at least a little information behind the names.

Why the blog and what is the purpose of it? This is going to primarily be a blog about tea, but since I’m writing for myself and not for you, it is assured that matters of the Christian faith, music, fatherhood and all my other idiosyncrasies will creep into my posts. I guess you’ve been forewarned? Now when I say tea, I mean puerh tea. There is a myriad of other teas, some of them even worth talking about like Fu Zhuan which I’m sure we will chat about at some point. Puerh though… Puerh is the king of teas. Perhaps my first real post will be about why I regard it so.

Let’s start off with how I got into tea though. Prior to getting into tea, I was obsessed with all things tobacco. The plant mesmerized me. Not only did I enjoy smoking it, I wanted to know everything about it. How was it grown? How was it processed and cured? How did the growing regions differ? Cigars were my primary focus and even more questions and curiosities were raised with them: how were cigars stored? How did cigars transform when properly stored and aged? How did certain cigar brands and their blending methods differ? I soaked it all up and drank it all in. I eventually had to distance myself from the hobby though for a number of reasons. I needed and wanted to find something to fill the gap.

There entered tea. It was perhaps too perfect of a substitute. Up to that point, tea was super sweet and something my grandma made for summer dinners. Towards the end of my tobacco hobby, I managed to end up in a hippy herb shop that had a variety of loose-leaf teas. I can’t even recall what I tried but from that moment I was hooked. I didn’t even have a kettle at this point. I was boiling water in a sauce pan and using it to brew my tea. After a few months I eventually went to an Asian market where I bought some tinned teas. A few of them were Oolong. It was those cheap unflavored oolongs that made me realize I had stumbled onto something.

I started reading as much as I could find online. All roads led me to puerh: a tea that could be aged like cigars, and where terroir and blending was important. I went to my local tea shops and bought what was labeled as puerh. Of course it ended up being cheap shou puerh that I was brewing incorrectly. Stinky fish water that tasted like dirt and smelled like a brackish pond. I nearly wrote the tea off but something told me to keep researching. How could all these folks be wrong? I found many shared my story and that I needed to try “raw” puerh and also brew it with a “gaiwan” with specific parameters. All good, but this was back in 2010. I was poor, none of this was easy to find and I wasn’t about to buy a bunch of stuff online when I wasn’t even sure I liked it.

Enter 2011. I got married and by the grace of God our honeymoon was in San Francisco. We ended up visiting china town and walked into a couple of tea shops. I happened to find a gaiwan and two matching cups that I purchased (which I still own, my ultimate treasure. Pictures will come later). I also found a dayi 7542 (which got finished in 2020. Wish I would’ve bought two). I didn’t even have a smart phone at this point in my life and had to rely on what I’d read. Standing in the shop, I definitely remembered reading that this was a brand I needed to try and that a 7542 was important. I looked at it for what felt like forever. My wife begged me to hurry up. I had never bought this much tea before, and certainly never bought a cake. The sticker indicated it was green, and from my research that meant it was raw and the one I needed to try. It was barely a year old, and still cost me 50 bucks: an unthinkable number for me at the time. Spending 50 dollars on a cake in 2011 would be like spending at least 100 dollars today. Maybe quite a bit more given inflation in general and how the puerh market has blown up. Gotta remember this was a china town tea shop though – they probably should’ve been selling that 7542 for 20 bucks.

Regardless of the details, when I got home I was able to have my first gongfu tea session with my first raw puerh and I was instantly hooked. I was in love. I knew this was a hobby I wanted to sink my teeth into and one I could not feel guilty about. I didn’t have the wealth of information that we have now in those early years. I had to rely on a couple of blogs, a few forums and intuition. The western facing vendors were slim. I grew up in the wild west. But now we must consider ourselves lucky. Even though we still know so little, we know so much more than we did.

We still have to answer the question of, why the blog? I hope that this will benefit someone other than myself. I have been drinking puerh for 12 years now. A lot has changed since I started. Things are going to keep changing, for better or worse. That’s why this blog is for me just as much as it is for you. I wish I could go back and read my thoughts through the years. Best I start now I suppose, before things change even more. Introductions are over now.

Blake, remember why you’re writing and why you are here. You’re writing for fun. You’re writing because you enjoy writing, and you enjoy tea. You’re writing to capture a moment with words. It’s a picture, but more detailed. You’ll look back on these entries and smile. You’ll smile because of how little you knew. You’ll smile because of how hopeful you were. You’ll smile because you’ve grown older and changed, just like the tea you store and drink. You’ll smile.