- The Oolong Drunk
The Correlation Between Puer and Cat People
Hello hello!
In the tea community, the puer community to be exact, there’s a lot of animal lovers that tend to share love for their pets on social media. Rather if you’re a tea company thats named after a pet, or a blogger that’s named after a beloved animal, the vast majority of us have a loving connection to cats and dogs. However, lately I started to notice a pattern between felines and puer heads. So I had to ask the question to many of our leading tea personalities: are you a cat person?
For this survey, I asked fellow puer heads if they were a cat person or not. However, before moving forward, I wanted to specify that a puer head is someone whose favorite tea is puer. Anyhow, I asked this question to see if there’s a direct correlation between puer heads and cat people. I asked puer heads on social media, and even asked tea shop owners, so I could get a wider range of answers. To constitute as a participant, they had to be involved in the tea community for quite some time and had to primarily review, share photos of, or sell and drink puer tea.
For the results, I surveyed 20 participants, and these are the results gathered from the survey…
Question:
Are you a cat person?
Yes:
14
No:
6
Percentage of puer heads that associate their self as a cat person:
70%
Overall recap, 14 people said they were cat people out of a total of 20 participants. This means that 70% of puer heads identify their self as a cat person. But why is this? As an honorary cat person, my bias says it’s because cats are totally awesome bro. In my honest opinion, there’s no greater joy and gratitude than winning over the affection of a cat. But after some reflection, I noticed that there were a lot of similarities between puer tea and domesticated house cats…
Like a cat, puer is picky
Like a cat, puer isn't loved by everybody
Like puer, cats can be difficult. The time you put into a cat, the time you receive back
You can love it to an infinite amount, and yet, you’re not guaranteed its love back
Your relationship with puer and with a cat is on its terms, not yours
Cats and puer can be cool one day, and be funky the next. Attitude changes weekly, or daily, for no reason whatsoever.
No matter how ruined puer or a cat is, there’s no fixing it.
Despite the many similarities, there’s a few differences between cats and puer tea that seem obvious. Such as, you can’t gong-fu a cat in a gaiwan. Although a cat will try to conform its body to any shape it lies in, if you pour hot water on a cat, the cat will horribly injure you and you’ll be reported to the authorities for animal cruelty. You can’t be reported for animal cruelty for brewing puer tea, now can you? No you can’t.
I was discussing this topic with fellow tea head Andrew Richardson (aka Liquid Proust), and he gave some insight as to why puer heads more commonly identify as cat people. Andrew suggested that a lot of people in the tea community are introverted. After thinking about what he said, it started to make sense. Introverts and cats typically have calming personalities. So by default, you’d expect a hobby that’s often done in solitude would get along with something as docile as a house cat. However, in my experience, many puer heads and many cats are very friendly and laid back. However, you’ll still come across a few crazy ones here and there.
There’s nothing wrong with being introverted, and while a lot of us may not have very outgoing personalities, it speaks volumes to willingly share your life through your blog, your social media accounts, through your tea shop, or through your own website. With that being said, you may be pondering the question of if you’re a cat person or not, just remember that it doesn't really matter because you’re part of the reason why this community is so great...
Note - Special Thank to Bitter Leaf Teas for providing photos of their kitties for this article
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List of Participants [20 in Total] -
Companies - White2Tea, Crimson Lotus Tea, Moychay, Bitter Leaf Teas, Yunnan Sourcing
Bloggers - Death by Tea, Tohao Tony, Oolong Owl, Tea Database, Tea For Me Please
Social Media - grill_, haveyeawilltravel, boychick2989, darksideoftea, Volkan_houshan, delightfulkiwi, Matu, chaiveck, gooseberryspoon, s.g.sanders_teaman
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