What to make of one of those seriously Icky-Yucky sessions. A brief ramble follows.

I do not write about tea experiences I don't enjoy. I don't tell you I had so-and-so's 2013 offering of such-and-such and how it failed to impress. I am not a critic. And by 'enjoy' I don't necessarily mean to indicate easy and sweet, light on the palate, 'fun' to drink.  In a good session there can be bitterness, astringency, a sense of not feeling comfortable in my own skin, it can be a long road with hours spent tasting a tea evolve from steep to steep. But what, aside from nothing, can one say when a session, which has been explored fully, and more than once, leaves one with nothing more than a bad taste in ones mouth and an overflowing seep-tray as well as a filled-to-the-rim waste water receptacle?

To be 'judgey,' especially at the beginning of my tea explorations, (it has been almost a year) is haughty, stupid and wrong. It can be something I don't like, and don't want to explore further, but knowing the tea came from a good source, knowing lots of info on the tea I find myself at a loss for what to think. To hell with writing about it, I just want to know what to think about it! Knowing it's either a crappy harvest and the seller isn't exactly going to talk about that in their online write-up, what can I say aside from nothing? I've taken to posting a photo on occasion with no caption as a kind of tiny shout-out that I  didn't 'get it' with this tea, always in the hopes that someone will PM me on Instagram and we can commiserate. One of my all time favorite tea-sellers once did tell me before sending me a tea we agreed upon that he was disappointed in the harvest and it wasn't the best example of the tea, and I should be aware of that. Because of that I buy a lot of teas from that seller, because a relationship with that sort of honesty is rare simply because they cannot do it! Some sellers won't sell a tea they are displeased with. Perhaps they liked it when they bought it, got it to their shop and it had changed in a way they weren't satisfied with, and were not ready to put it for sale.
I could of course write the owner/vendor on these occasions, (thankfully pretty rare which is amazing considering how many kinds of tea I try and re-try) and tell them about how much this tea did not 'do it' for me, the flatness of it, the lack of warmth, but why bother?
If it were the vendor who warned me that the sample he was sending me wasn't up to his standards, I would write the vendor in a heartbeat, but I don't have that relationship with any other sellers online, although the sellers I buy from I trust rather implicitly not to sell me or any of us shit, and I know you do too, dear readers since it was you who introduced me to them.

What do you do when a tea is just awful yet you do not have the experience, language or capacity to judge it beyond your own fallible taste-buds?