Great Tea Time in China!

10 years old aged raw puer from 1100-1200 years old wild ancient arbor tea tree.

The package of the 10 years old aged raw puer from 1100-1200 years old wild ancient arbor tea tree - - Rui Gong Tian Chao

The liquor of the 10 years old aged raw puer from 1100-1200 years old wild ancient arbor tea tree

On this trip, I am so lucky to be introduced to Mr. Xiao who owns a wild ancient arbor tea plantation in Yunan. Today, He shared three kinds of tea with me.

We started with 2003 Menghai cooked puer; followed by 2012 sun-dried loose wild raw puer tea. And the last one was a 10 years old aged raw puer from 1100-1200 years old ancient arbor tea tree.

Mr. Xiao used 3 grants of 10 years old aged raw puer, and cooked it. The energy and complexity of the first infusion of tea was super powerful. The Tea Qi started from my forehead, traveled to my eyes, shoulder, hands, upper back. It makes my month water for about half hour. Second infusion was very smooth, gentle and very sweet clean long aftertaste. Third infusion was delicate, more gentle and refreshing.

After that I was so satisfied and stoned!! It was the most impressive tea I have had on this trip so far!

And I am invited to share his only one 1970s Puer and only one 1970s Hunan Dark Tea (Fuzhuan) tomorrow morning. I am not going to sleep. Just can not wait for that!

2012 Loose Raw Puer from 2012 Wild Ancient Arbor Tree

Two Tea Buds were picked from 2700 Years Old Wild Ancient Arbor tree (The oldest tea tree in the world)

How to store your puerh tea

I was so excited! One of my friends invited me to taste a puerh tea produced in the 1980s. The cake had just arrived from China, and in a week we would meet to share it together. This week seemed neverending. When the date we set finally arrived, I raced to his place for a taste of something genuinely special.

After eagerly opening the paper wrapper, I noticed some white spots spread unevenly over the surface of the tea. This elicited my first concern about its quality. Raising the cake for better inspection, my excitement was stifled by the odor of mold. This stink was immediate and conclusive proof that the tea had been tainted due to poor storage. I didn't want to disappoint my friend so quickly and kept my silence as I carefully separated the cake and prepared the tea. The liquor was dull and dark like ink. The flavor was muddy and moldy. It all confirmed my original suspicion that the tea had been contaminated.

How did this happen? The tea was stored in an overly warm and moist environment, either due to negligence or perhaps to hasten fermentation. As a result, the amount of moisture the tea absorbed rose over 10% of its total mass, creating felicitous conditions for growing mold. In China, it is not unusual to use warmth and moisture to mature puerh while it is in storage, although they are supposed to be controlled. We even have a professional term for this: "wet-stored" (shicang 湿仓) puerh. As one might suspect, the alternative is known as "dry-stored" (gancang 干仓) puerh.

Of course, it is both very disappointing and frustrating to age a cake for decades, only to grow mold, or produce what should have been a delicacy and is now only compost. So what are the significant points we should know to store our tea properly?


1. Air Circulation is necessary 

Don't store puerh in a plastic bag or airtight container, because the microbes that cause fermentation need to breathe. Constant and regular air circulation will help the tea develop and blow away odors. However, puerh should not be kept anywhere breezy (e.g. next to a window, doorway, or on a balcony), as the wind will carry its aroma and flavor away. In sum, moderate air flow is important, but drafts should be avoided.


2. Constant Temperature is necessary

The best temperature to store puerh is between 68-86°F (20-30° C). If the temperature is too high, it will affect the mouthfeel. The taste could become dull, flat or sour. In addition, raw (sheng 生) puerh will sometimes develop into cooked (shu 熟) puerh (this has been reported for tea stored in Hong Kong). This means a normal indoor temperature for us would be suitable for puerh as well.


3. Moderate Humidity is necessary 

As mentioned above, puerh is divided into two kinds according to storage method: "dry-stored" puerh (gancang puerh 干仓普洱) and "wet-stored" puerh (shicang puerh 湿仓普洱). The former refers to tea allowed to ferment naturally in an environment that is relatively dry, ventilated, and moderately hot; the latter refers to tea aged in an environment with low ventilation and high humidity in order to hasten development. This is done sometimes because the tea producer can make more profit on it. 

                                                                    "Dry stored" puerh

                                                                  "Wet-stored" puerh


If the environment is too dry, it will slow down the ageing process. So if conditions where you live and keep your tea are dry (e.g. maybe you live in a desert or alpine environment), you can put a glass of water next to your puerh, to increase the nearby humidity slightly. Alternately, if conditions are too humid, it will typically result in mold, as happened to the tea I tried at my friend's house.


4. Avoid any odor 


Tea is very good at absorbing any kind of odor. Not long ago, I bought a second-hand dress that had a strong unpleasant smell. I didn't want the stench to spread to the rest of my clothes, so I left some loose tea leaves in the dresser drawer. A few days later, the tea had the strong smell of the dress, which itself smelled better than before. My advice is that you should never store your tea, no matter what kind, in an environment that has any other scents whatsoever.


5. Material to wrap the tea

Imagine tea has a life like us and needs to breathe. Pack your tea in something made from a permeable material, such as organic nonwoven bags, kraft paper bags, paper towels, wooden or cardboard boxes, bamboo baskets or husks, clay or porcelain containers, and so on. I strongly recommend you do not put puerh tea in a plastic bag if you are planning to store your tea for years. Moreover, do not keep tea in a metal container. Remember that whatever packaging you choose should have no other smell.


Once you understand puerh as having a life just like us, it becomes easier to see how to keep it alive. It should have a comfortable place to stay; somewhere not too fancy or complicated. There is no need for refrigeration (remember I am talking about puerh, not green tea), no need to seal it in an airtight container, no special equipment and no direct sunlight. You can store it in your study room where there are no other smells and some air moves through. If the room is too dry or humid, it is better to open the window once in a while. In Pacific Northwest weather or during a monsoon, the tea has a greater chance of growing moldy, so remember to examine it occasionally. Finally, I want to remind you yet again that you should never keep your tea in an area with other smells, such as a bathroom, kitchen, new cabinet, drawer holding soap, incense, etc. Moreover, you should understand that puerh cakes from the same production line will have different aromas and tastes because they have been aged in different conditions. Decades after they are made, one from Yunnan will never be the same as one from Hong Kong, Taiwan or the USA.

One final aside is that you should not store cooked and raw puerh together.


I am sure if you follow these rules to store your puerh tea, the tea will be safe and develop well. Enjoy it, and don't forget to invite me by for a sip! :)

How to identify the differences between raw puerh and cooked puerh

It makes me very glad to meet more and more people in the USA who enjoy drinking ripe/cooked (shu 熟) puerh. However, it seems to me that many people still fail to appreciate the depth and value of raw/uncooked (sheng 生) puerh. Moreover, many people are unable to distinguish cooked and raw puer. This confusion has prompted me to write about the differences between these two teas.

Raw puerh is also called "naturally fermented" (天然发酵) puerh and utilizes entirely traditional production techniques dating back at least to the Tang Dynasty. Cooked puerh involves induced fermentation - also called "artificial fermentation" (人工发酵) - a new technology invented in 1973 by scientists at the Kunming Tea Factory (昆明茶厂). This means that if someone tries to sell you a cooked puerh tea cake purported to be more than 38 years old, you might consider finding an excuse to remove yourself from this person as soon as possible, because it is a pure lie. There was absolutely no cooked puerh tea produced before 1973.

But what if the sales staff in a teashop serve you a cup of puerh? Will you recognize what kind it is? If you can display some understanding, it might inspire the sales staff to bring out superior teas they don't bother to offer to the general public. Really, it's true. In general, if you want a high-quality product in a Chinese shop, you have to show your knowledge - or at least taste - before the staff will give you anything special. Although it's not polite to show off, it's important to have at least a basic knowledge of what you'd like to buy, because it demonstrates respect. Without that, the staff won't waste their time (or tea, in this instance). With it, they'll generally be happy not only to help you, but to participate in your education. In the case of tea, this often involves sharing something rare, made in only a certain place, for only a limited time, perhaps only by a certain person. This indicates how important it is to show basic respect - not just for people, but knowledge itself. Now, back to the question that began this paragraph:

To determine whether you are drinking a raw or cooked puerh, you can use a number of methods to recognize the differences between them:

  

                                      the top row shows raw puerh, the bottom cooked puerh

1. Differences in Processing:

Raw puerh: Fresh tea leaves (in many cases from special varieties of tea grown only in Yunnan) are plucked, spread on mesh screens and air-dried, tumbled, kneaded, sifted and then sun-dried, to become loose raw puerh tea (普洱散生茶), which is then steamed at a high temperature and compressed into different shapes. After compressing, the tea is allowed to naturally ferment. It takes at least 15 to 20 years for a raw tea cake to age into a vintage raw puerh.

Cooked puerh: The loose raw puerh tea leaves are spread on the floor of an enclosure with strictly controlled temperature and humidity, where water and micro-organisms are added to induce fermentation (wodui 渥堆). Both the speed and ultimate result of this process (in terms of its effect of the character of the tea) depend on the maturity of the initial tea leaves. Overall, this process reduces astringency and mellows the taste of the tea, which is then steamed and compressed. 

2. The Color of the Made Tea (Final Product): 

Raw puerh:
The overall color should be a dark or blackish green, while the color of the buds is white.

Cooked puerh:
The major hue should be black or a reddish brown, while the buds are a dark golden color

3. The Color of the Tea Liquor

Raw puerh: For tea from a young raw teacake, the liquor should be clear and bright, with a yellowish green color. If the tea has been aged over 5 years, the color should be more golden or orange like a half-oxidized oolong tea. As the tea ages, the color of the infusion will become increasingly reddish or reddish brown.

Cooked puerh: The infusion will generally range from a reddish brown matte to a dark red. Some are dark like black coffee.

4. The Aroma of the Tea Liquor

Raw puer: Younger ones have fresh, floral, fruity notes in their aromas, much like a green tea. As the tea ages, its fragrance takes on suggestions of lotus, orchid, honey and other delicate scents, as well as a rich woody, earthy, rainforest character.

Cooked puerh: Typical aromatic suggestions are those of wood, mushroom, jujube (Chinese dates), earth, forest or even beets.

5. The Taste of the Tea Liquor

Raw puerh: This depends greatly on the age of the tea. Younger teas are generally intense with pronounced bitterness and astringency but a rather strong sweet aftertaste. As time goes by, the flavor becomes more and more mellow, smooth, crisp, substantial and highly structured. The mouthfeel of a genuine well-aged puerh gently caresses your whole mouth like drinking soft silk, with a mellow but vivid living quality and long sweet finish.

Cooked puerh: The flavor never gets bitter and is gentle, rich, mellow and complex (although less so than a mature raw puerh). This depends on the fermentation as well. Teas of below-average quality sometimes leave a little tingling and dryness on the velar (back) part of the tongue. If the tea is made of leaves from an ancient tea tree, the sweet aftertaste will be longer.

6. Appearance of the Infused Leaves

Raw puerh: The leaves should be yellowish green or dark green in color, soft, plump and flexible. In general, it should be easy to find well-formed whole leaves.

Cooked puerh: The color of the brewed leaves typically ranges from reddish brown to dark brown. Cakes contain few complete leaves. The leaf pieces they do contain are generally rough, irregular and easy to break.

7. Price

Because a raw puerh tea cake must be aged for 10-20 years to attain a basic level of maturity (when it begins to exhibit its celebrated vivid, rich, supple and complex taste), whereas the flavor of a cooked tea cake (its richness and lack of both bitterness and astringency) does not develop considerably even with further storage, a well-aged raw puerh tea cake is often twice as expensive as a cooked puer cake, even if they share the same production year.

This is due to the fact that induced fermentation affects the process of natural fermentation： while it accelerates many chemical changes，it also arrests other more subtle changes that occur during natural fermentation， such that a cooked tea cake never develops the highly structured complexity of a properly aged raw tea cake. That's why it is not worthwhile to age cooked puerh teas over 2 or 3 decades, whereas people in China even invest in raw puerh for their children's future. The best raw puerh brick teas can be valued by connoisseurs for prices as high as thousands of dollars.

After all that, I should probably mention that the single factor that perhaps most profoundly effects the taste of puerh tea is whether or not it is stored properly. Some teas aged over 2 decades nevertheless taste terribly moldy, muddy and dull. Anyone willing to invest hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars in puerh tea might be well advised to learn how to provide an environment appropriate for storage. Those of you holding your precious tea cakes in your hand as you read this will just have to wait for next post for more information. :D

Unique Puerh tea

Generally speaking, the fresher a tea is, the better its quality and more expensive it is, with one notable exception: Puer.

Puer (also written Pu-erh, Pu-Er, Puerh) tea is named after the city of Puer in Yunnan Province, located in southwest China on the border of Laos and Burma. The reason Puer tea has the same name as the city of Puer is not because tea was traditionally grown there; rather, as the city of Puer was the main trading center for this type of tea, its name became associated with the distinctive type of tea sold there.

Puer is a type of dark tea (黑茶 hei cha, lit: 'black tea'). Here I should probably mention that the type of tea called 'black tea' in English is referred to as 'red tea' (红茶 hong cha) in Chinese. This means that Darjeeling, Assam and blends such as English Breakfast are all called 'red tea' in Chinese. The English name is a reference to leaf color, whereas the Chinese name refers to liquor color.

Puer is famous for improving with age. In fact, the longer Puer is stored, the more vitality it accumulates. It is like a relationship. We need time to build it and discover the beauty of each other. The more attention and care you invest, the more value you will receive.

What makes Pu-erh tea so unique?

1. The tea varietal used to make Puer:

Puer is made from a special "broad-leaf" varietal of C. sinensis var. sinensis that is different from the varietals used to produce green, oolong and other teas. Puer leaves are classified into one of four categories according to the type of tea tree from which they are harvested: 1. "new plantation tea" (from artificially propagated large-leaf tea bushes, not yet old enough really to qualify as "trees"), 2. "arbor-type tea" (from

mature trees from older - and sometimes formerly abandoned - plantations), 3. "old tree tea" (from wild tea trees that are 30 to 50 years old) and 4. "ancient tree tea" (from wild trees older than 50 years - some of which are even thousands of years old).

2. The categories of Puer:

Puer is the only major category of tea that is actually fermented. Although common parlance refers to oolong and black teas as "fermented," in fact, they are oxidized. No fermentation takes place. Like wine and beer, Puer changes with age due to the activity of micro-organisms that cause fermentation. There are two forms of this process used in the production of Puer:

1). Naturally Fermented Puer (aka "uncooked" or "raw" Puer 生普洱)
2). Artificially Fermented Puer (aka "cooked" or "ripe" Puer 熟普洱)

Raw Puer is produced using traditional methods. Initial processing - including compressing the tea into cakes - is done prior to fermentation so that a new cake of raw Puer has approximately the same degree of oxidation as a green tea. Many buyers purchase very young Puer - when its taste is still quite bitter and astringent, but its cost is quite reasonable - and then increase its value by storage. Stored in a proper environment, the tea naturally ferments, and the taste, color and flavor change as time goes by.

Ripe Puer was invented in 1973. This utilizes an artificial fermentation process (called wodui 渥堆 in Chinese) to remove the astringent taste of the tea and effectuate the same health benefits that obtain for mature aged raw Puer. That said, Ripe Puer can also be post-fermented through storage, to develop more refined and superior attributes - although many would assert that a Ripe Puer cake could never evolve to the heights that make aged Raw Puer cakes so expensive. Accordingly, the price of Ripe Puer is typically at least half that of a Raw Puer from the same production year. Economically speaking, Ripe Puer is more popular than Raw Puer.

3. Decades of shelf life:

In China, another nickname for Puer is "the drinkable antique" because its quality and value improve with age. It becomes more flavorful, more full-bodied, more subtle, more smooth, more sustained and more luxurious after a period of storage. Most of the aged raw Puer on the market is 10 to 50 years old, but there are also cakes which date from the late Qing dynasty and early Republican era. The price of a well-aged Puer cake can be up to thousands of dollars.

4. A wide variety of shapes:

Raw and Ripe Puer are sold in both loose-leaf form and as compressed cakes (jinya cha 紧压茶).

The most common shape of compressed tea is a disc (called bingcha 饼茶 in Chinese), followed by bowl or nest shape (tuocha 沱茶), brick tea (zhuancha 砖茶), square tea (fangcha 方茶), mushroom-shaped tea (jincha 紧茶), and melon or 'gold melon'-shaped tea (jingua 金瓜), in addition to a number of others.

From ancient until quite recent times, the transportation for exporting tea from Yunnan to Tibet (including parts of modern Sichuan) was very primitive. There were no cars or trains or other vehicles. So how could tea merchants export the Puerh tea? The answer is the Old Tea-Horse Road (茶马古道). Compression of Puer tea into dense cakes eased horseback transportation and helped make the tea more durable.

5. The distinctive warm silky taste:

If someone invites you to taste a well-stored Puer tea over 20 years old, you should never say no, even if you have never liked Puer, because you will have a remarkable experience. The amazingly smooth mouthfeel, impressively rich, thick, mellow, vivid and full body of taste will spread to every corner of your mouth, and the sweet aftertaste will linger on your tongue and in your throat. You will feel the warmness of the tea from your mouth all the way down to your stomach. It feels like a beautiful peaceful candle in a frozen dark winter evening. The smoothness of aged Puer tea is like a 100% silk scarf - comfortable, soft, gentle and soothing.

Of course, if Puer tea is not mature enough, especially a young Raw Puer, normally what you will taste is bitterness, astringency and harshness - yet you might still find the pleasant sweet aftertaste underneath.

Please don't be frightened by what I just wrote. One can still find decent Puer at a reasonable price here in the US.

6. The flavor of an ancient forest:

If this tea doesn't remind you of nature, then I don't know what could possibly send you a stronger signal. Do you know what the forest floor smells like? Earthy. There is a special earthy flavor to Puer. Its flavor and aroma reveal a wealth and complexity gained only with maturity, just like a fine wine.

7. Multiple infusions:

Puer is a languorous sleepy beauty: it needs extra heat, time and infusions to wake up. A good-quality, well aged, mature Puer brewed in a clay teapot or Gaiwan can withstand 20 or more infusions. An average Puer can be steeped about 7 or 8 times before starting to fade; the best flavor is in the 3rd or 4th infusion.

My parents grow and process a small amount of tea every year at home but that is green tea and the taste and character of Puer is certainly different. For many years I didn't like Puer at all and didn't understand how people enjoy it so much. It was too deep, mature, calm and complex for me, but today I am fascinated and attracted by Puer. I love its silky mouthfeel - the smoothness on my tongue, gums and throat lasting for a long time, relaxing my body and calming my mind. Image a leaf gently, slowly floating on a quiet stream with nothing to stop her, or a small pinch of soft cotton floating through a sunny day in a blue clear sky with white clouds and comfortable breeze. That leaf or pinch of cotton would be me; the floating free feeling would be the magic of Puer. Moreover, it warms me up both physically and emotionally and is a welcome respite from a busy, tiring, stressful and complicated life. I hope it can be for you too.