Amgalan Chin

Amgalan Chin grew up between Ulan-Ude and Kyakhta, on the Russian side of the old tea road, in a household where pressed bricks from Hunan and Yunnan were still kept in wooden chests behind the stove. He read Mongolian and Mandarin at university in Ulaanbaatar, then spent four seasons (2014–2017) between Menghai, Jinggu, and the Yiwu mountain villages — Mahei, Gaoshan, Luoshuidong — apprenticing with small-press producers and learning the slow grammar of Wò Duī (渥堆) wet-piling at a state factory outside Pu'er city.

His specialty across the constellation is the long view: how Shēng Pǔ'ěr (生普洱) from Bulang and Yiwu shifts across decades of Russian, Mongolian, and Guangdong storage, and what that means for a cake you might buy today on shop.puerh.app and open in 2041. He keeps a working cellar in Tbilisi and a smaller reference set in Saint Petersburg, and he reads tea like a topographer reads contour lines — slowly, with notebooks.

On tea.events he hosts two recurring formats. The Yiwu spring cupping — Berlin is a focused single-afternoon session each April, eight seats, four micro-villages, gaiwan-only, blind-flighted against a 2008 reference cake. The Silent aged-sheng retreat — Kazbegi runs five days in the Caucasus each autumn: pre-dawn brewing, no phones, no talking before noon, eighteen cakes from 1999 to 2015 worked through one per evening. Both formats sit at the slow end of the calendar — these are not festivals.

Beyond hosting, Amgalan contributes the aging curriculum at tea.school and reviews submissions for the Pǔ'ěr track at tea.degree. He writes occasionally for puerh.app on regional storage humidity (Kunming dry vs. Guangzhou natural vs. the Buryat winter swing), and he sits on the sourcing panel for shop.thetea.app, where he vets every aged sheng before it goes to listing.

He teaches in Russian, Mandarin, and English, with passable Mongolian for older producers. His sessions tend to be quiet, technical, and unhurried — he will spend forty minutes on a single 2003 Menghai brick if the room is willing. Participants tend to come back. The Kazbegi cohort has a sixty per cent return rate across three years.

If you want to find him outside scheduled events, he is usually in Tbilisi between November and February, in Yunnan during the spring harvest, and somewhere on a train in between. Reach him through the tea.community keeper directory.