There’s a popular notion that over the course of seven years the cells of the human body regenerate and you’ve essentially become a new person, at least in the physical sense. Whether it’s true or not is not for me to say, but it’s a concept that occurred to me as I reflected on my latest year as a dedicated fan of tea.

July marked the end of seven years that I’ve been writing about tea at my own site. Whether or not I’ve become a new person in that time I can’t say. What I do know is that I’ve learned quite a bit about this vast subject (maybe in seventy more years I’ll be starting to get the hang of it) and my tastes in tea have changed considerably.

When I started drinking tea I was quite fond of flavored varieties, for the most part. But my tastes began to change over the years and this year I finally decided to swear off that flavored stuff altogether. Which is not to say that I’ll never ever drink it again, but it could happen. This year I also decided that I’d completely lost interest in a few other types of tea (white, puerh, Darjeeling) a topic I wrote about more extensively in an another article at this site.

In the same vein, I’ve decided, with white and puerh out of the picture and my relatively minimal interest in yellow and oolong tea, that I’d renew my focus on green tea and especially black. Though I never waste an opportunity to proclaim my love for Assam tea, my mainstay this year has actually been a Chinese black variety known as Yunnan.

On the writing front, 2012 found me contributing more than 150 articles to this very site on a wide variety of topics. At my own site I turned in about 300 posts in all, which is not quite as impressive as it might seem, given that a fair number of those were reposts of other people’s fine commercials and videos on tea-related topics. And of course I’m not the only one, as you can see if you look at the Tea Blog List I’ve been maintaining there for many years. It swelled considerably this year and the next update should take to somewhere near the 400 mark.

Which wasn’t such a bad year, now that you mention it and I’m standing by to see what 2013 brings.

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