Someone commented this on a Quora post I added about a Vietnamese tea shop, some writing I did for Tea Journey magazine a year ago. It's what the title says, a Michelin guide to pu'er from a pu'er expert.
I'd expect some inconsistency and error in such a guide, even if written by a relative expert, and I wasn't disappointed. Most of it was fine, but the exceptions stood out. And what they didn't say also seemed odd; they referenced shou / shu / ripe pu'er processing, but never called it any of those names.
Since a lot of the content is good background information, and since selection of what to include or not include is a bit arbitrary, I don't want to be too negative about this source. By highlighting what doesn't work I'll be implying that it's full of errors, and low in quality or accuracy, but it's really not. It's just not 100% correct. Since it also lacks clear framing, what range the ideas fall within relative to the rest of pu'er experience scope, to me it's a bit more deeply flawed, even though most of it is ok with that framing added back in.
Let's start with the intro to the author, which places it as likely to be completely reliable:
For newcomers to the tea-drinking culture, how should they select the right pu’er tea? Ann Sit from Fook Ming Tong gave us some valuable insights.
Sit is a tea sommelier and Fook Ming Tong’s general manager. She began learning about Chinese tea as a teenager, and her qualification in tea connoisseurship has been recognised by the government of Mainland China. At the moment, she dedicates her time scouring tea plantations around China to source the best teas for her customers.
Sounds good. I don't know what Fook Ming Tong is, and that makes a lot of difference, but let's move on from that (after pointing out that the first Google search entry describes it as a Hong Kong tea shop).
What’s the distinguishing characteristic of pu’er?
Tea leaves are mainly categorised by the degree of fermentation. The production process of pu’er involves procedures such as picking, withering, fixing, kneading, drying. In the end, it’s heaped up and stored before it gets fermented. In comparison to oolong, green tea, shoumei, tieguanyin and other tea varieties, pu’er is fermented the most. Industry professionals call it black tea or post fermented tea.
In fermentation, the stimuli in tea leaves like chlorophyll are decomposed. Pu’er is usually dark brown in colour. It tastes mild and smooth. Thanks to the long fermentation period, there’s also a deep fragrance to the tea.
At first read this is all wrong, but taken in the right way it works better. Fermentation is a main input to pu'er, but it's not clear that she doesn't really mean oxidation here, or isn't mixing the two terms and inputs. Pu'er isn't typically oxidized, but any background on pu'er should make it a bit clearer which process is being referenced, since fermentation is often used incorrectly to specify oxidation.
The processing steps are fine. Kneading should really be shaping, since it's more conventional to call a different leaf bruising step in black tea processing kneading, intended to break open the plant cells to allow air contact with the cell contents, and resulting oxidation. Pu'er is made using the other steps, then after a pan-frying fixing step it's shaped into that twisted leaf form. It's probably not so bad to call that shaping step kneading; the different use of terms is minor.
In the next sentence, about tea types, Tie Guan Yin is a type of oolong, and Shou Mei is white tea, so it mixes types and broad categories in an odd way, but that's still fine. Saying that pu'er is a type of hei cha--black tea, or dark tea, from the Chinese categorization system that calls oxidized teas red instead of black--sort of works, and sort of doesn't. Some people think it's a version of that, but it's more common in China to use hei cha to designate a range of other types, like Liu Bao, Fu brick teas, and so on. Again this is sort of splitting hairs; plenty of people use this categorization that she mentions, it's just that others wouldn't see it that way. In "the West" people argue if sheng pu'er is really hei cha, since it's only fermented after aging input, but they seem to miss some background too, as I see it. We can just call pu'er pu'er, and leave the broad categories out of it.
The next part skips over that sheng pu'er exists, that not all pu'er is fermented in any way. It circles back to including that, so it's just an odd initial framing choice, to get that mostly wrong. Really you need to read those sentences a few times to sort out what she's really saying, and later it gets more confusing when sheng and shou descriptions are mixed together in different places.
How many types of pu’er are there?
Pu’er can be roughly divided into loose tea leaves and tea cake. After fermentation, tea cakes can be made using steam and machinery to flatten. Without shaping, it would be sold as loose leaves.
Some pu’er teas can be fermented longer than others. The dry room method puts leaves in an airy space for natural fermentation. Alternatively, some tea makers would ferment the tea manually by placing it in a room with high temperature and humidity. This step is called piling. The wet room method has the tea in a humidity-controlled space to speed up fermentation.
Loose leaves or tea cake can be further categorised into many more varieties. For example, raw (sheng) or green pu’er have a shorter post-fermenting period and would display a light green colour after brewing. As for tea cakes, there are many shapes available. Tea bricks are pressed into rectangular blocks, while tuo cha carries the form of mushroom caps.
This is all more right than wrong, but the degree of error included is puzzling. Of course someone can see the distinction of loose and pressed pu'er as primary. Most people would see the divide between sheng / raw and shou / shu / ripe / pre-fermented tea as more fundamental, but this part is still ok.
The piling description of pre-fermentation of shu is too far off to accept in this way. It's piled wet, with water added, not just stored in a humid room.
The reference to a "shorter post-fermenting period" really makes no sense. You can sell sheng as completely unaged, as soon as you make it, not fermented through ordinary storage at all, so there is no period to reference. Just referencing post-fermentation is misleading, as if there is some other treatment step. You just hold onto the tea. Within one year it's not really all that age / fermentation transitioned, regardless of storage climate, and after 25 to 30 years the process is relatively complete, with other changes happening in between.
Note that the light green reference is the wetted leaf color. Sure, they're a bit green, where shou pu'er is brownish. The brewed liquid color would be a pale yellow, and this isn't clear on which it's referencing. Not much brewed tea liquid is actually green, but that can come up with Japanese green tea versions.
I like this reference to mushroom caps; tuos do look like that. Usually they're referenced as bird's nest shaped, and I guess that also works.
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the bottom is sort of cupped, so from the top it just looks like a ball |
In the next section she says that people new to sheng should buy loose tea, which is fine, even though that's not how it usually tends to go in practice. The she comments this, which doesn't work:
A tea cake costs at least $300. Some are even priced at several thousand dollars.
I wouldn't own a tea cake if it costs $300; that's way outside my budget. That Xiaguan tuo shown (two different pictures of different versions) would often cost between $10 and $30-some for different versions of different ages, in online outlets. They're not tea cakes though; those are 100 grams of tea, instead of a standard 357 grams for cakes (which varies). I've just ran across mention that a famous Hong Kong shop, Yee On Tea, sells one of their aged Xiaguan tuos at the same age range (around 20 years old) for $60; that kind of thing would depend on different factors, like preferred storage input, and initial quality of the material.
I'd say the range of factory cakes, large-scale producer versions, is between $40 and 60, for new, moderate quality versions. Those aren't ready to drink yet though, because that kind of tea requires aging. Most Western boutique-oriented vendors sell their cake versions between $80 and $160, with fully aged versions falling into a higher level and broader range. You can find high quality, limited production, high demand young (new) sheng cakes for $300 and up, but they are very much the exception.
What to look out for when buying loose leaves?
The most important element is that the leaves remain intact. There shouldn’t be too many broken leaf fragments, branches and petioles. You need to also give it a sniff. The leaves should smell fragrant instead of dull or sour. If you spot green mould, it means the leaves have gone bad and should not be bought. It would be ideal to taste the tea on the spot. The brewed tea has a rich and bright red colour. However dark the tea is, it should be clear enough for you to see the bottom of the cup.
If you spot any color of mold you shouldn't buy a tea. Again this works ok for shou or aged sheng but for younger sheng the color range isn't right. I just reviewed a Xiaguan tuocha from 2006 that's in a decent place for aging input, not fully through the process, but quite pleasant, and it's not "red" yet:
It's pretty far off the initial pale gold infusion color, but will seem closer to red in another decade, at 29 years old. It might seem more desirable then, so maybe saying that at an optimum aged sheng should be darker works, but this isn't clarifying things for people who can't place those specifics. Let's consider a 20 year old version stored in Malaysia that I reviewed a couple of years ago:
It's more fermented, redder, related to being stored in a humid place, but then the other 19 year old Xiaguan also was (stored in a different humid place, Bangkok instead of Malaysia). Well-pressed tuochas seem to ferment a little slower, as hard-pressed iron cakes also do. Oddly younger teas stored in the right way can darken (ferment quite a bit) even faster, as these 6 and 9 year old Dayi / Taetea 7542 sheng pu'er versions did:
Just brewing a tea light or strong will affect coloration quite a bit, so I don't mean to make too much of this tangent. And loose stored sheng might well transition faster, making 20 year old versions more fermented and darker colored, as those two considerably younger cake versions--aged for less than a decade--just shown were.
Rating her content and input
Most of it is fine. I don't think it works well as a general guide as it could, since so much is left out, and what it all means is only clear when you already know what it's saying. The description of what shou pu'er is (a ripe or pre-fermented type) doesn't work at all here; it could hardly be less clearly explained. The premise of it talking about higher quality range pu'er should be made clearer, which really doesn't work well for shou, since even better quality, higher demand versions aren't all that expensive, so it's a different theme.
Shou tends so much less expensive that finding any cake that costs significantly over $60 to 80 is a rarity, unless it has been extensively aged, which doesn't really help much with shou. Of course there are plenty of outliers out there that cost over $100, but the average of what's on the market would be under 100, maybe even counting many aged versions.
The implication that she is mostly covering high quality tea range shifts things quite a bit. I can go and buy good factory shou cakes for $40 to 50 in lots of places, but she's talking about other range, what is better yet. Those same cakes would be kind of expensive in 15 to 20 years, so people see value in significant aging, even though it makes less and less difference past 3 or 4 years of early transition, for shou.
Let's go back to the initial framing, the intro, and see what is implied:
Pu’er tea is arguably one of the most popular Chinese teas. Its pervasiveness across all social groups is reflected in the price difference of various options in the market.
Pu’er can be seen at any dim sum restaurant for ten dollars a pot, but the same tea can also be sighted in the form of a cake at auctions, with connoisseurs splashing hundreds of thousands dollars for it.
That last part seems high; spending thousands on a cake should be enough. A desirable version from the 1930s might go for an outrageous price.
What does it tell us that the most basic range is ten dollars a pot? That could be about right, for low-medium quality pu'er, sold at a medium cost scale restaurant.
To discuss the quality range you are talking about you really need to specify what tea is selling for by cake, or as a price per gram, and from what kind of outlets. That level of detail isn't brought up in this, beyond the vague claim that tea cakes might sell for $300 or more, in general, which again doesn't really work. For higher demand, 20 or more year old cakes that's about right, or even some new material cakes from the more sought after origin areas, but for most of the market range that's way too high. She was focused more on generalities related to pu'er, and the experience, not cost and buying issues, but to invoke the cost theme at all it's necessary to place whatever range you are describing.
Maybe this fails the most related to the implied purpose: covering "Choosing Pu'er Tea." The main advice this gives is to buy loose tea versions (called maocha, which is also a reference to semi-processed teas of other types), which sort of works, and also sort of doesn't. Without it being clearer on the distinction between shou and sheng it couldn't possibly succeed. You need to outline why brand new--unaged and unfermented--sheng might be a viable selection, and why plenty of other range is only consumed as well aged tea, back to the boutique versus factory tea theme. It would help to treat the cost issue a bit, versus just saying that it all might be expensive. Xiaguan tuochas selling for between $10 and 30 are not so costly; standard cakes priced between $80 and $120 are less affordable, even though the per-gram higher end range of both isn't so different, which brings up the sampling theme, that vendors often sell smaller quantities for people to try.
Maybe I should re-write a better version. I've written sheng and shou basics posts before, (on exploring sheng pu'er, sheng pu'er aging exploration, but it's been years, so I could run back through that, with an eye towards how to source tea during the exploration phase.
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I ran across this looking for another photo; the visits are a favorite memory of those tastings |
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