A Tea Addict's Journal

I went tea shopping today. The shopping itself wasn’t the most fascinating, although I did buy some stuff for Action Jackson, who wanted some of the tuos we had last time we went to this store.

What was interesting was the conversation I had with the owner of the store today. It wasn’t the first time I heard this theory, and it won’t be the last. It probably also isn’t the last time either that I’ll hear this.

Basically, the theory is that pure dry storage is a sham, cooked up by self-interested merchants who basically got lucky.

It goes something like this — prior to the concept of “dry storage”, everything was wet stored. There were the accidental dry stored puerhs, but those are rare. For the most part, a proper puerh would’ve gone through the traditional HK storage. How much is appropriate was always up for debate, but it always went through SOME such storage.

However, in the late 80s/early 90s, there were people who wanted to get in, but who didn’t have years of old tea to supply themselves — all they had were newish cakes.

What do you do?

You claim that everybody can store it in their house and that it is, in fact, better to home store them. Dry storage, as a concept, was born. And from there… we got to where we are now. New teas are expensive, sometimes way more expensive than old teas, and many of them are still not drinkable years from now. In places like mainland China, even 5 years old tea can sometimes be considered “old”, whereas traditionally that would’ve merely been a “young” cake.

She does have a point, and I’ve often wondered the same thing. Teas that have gone through some HK storage, I think, can often taste better, change faster, and ultimately achieve better results. Pure dry storage has its merit, but is it enough?

To put it in perspective — the same person who was telling me this stuff also sells a bunch of newish cakes, many of which haven’t gone through HK storage, so it is not really the concept of dry storage that she has a problem with — it’s the results. I think what she really had issue with was 1) the idea that the drier the better, when in fact, you need certain humidity to achieve optimal aging conditions. 2) The idea that a cake that is under some number (say, 10) can be considered properly “puerh”.

I think I can agree with those points, for the most part. I don’t think cakes will age well in any climate. There’s a reaosn I am sticking all my teas, save a few things, in Hong Kong. I think I have seen enough cakes that are “drier” stored in places like Hong Kong or Taiwan that are quite good though, so I think it is not impossible to home store good tea. It is merely that it should not be taken to the extreme.

So perhaps the term “dry storage” (or gancang in Chinese) should really be tempered — it should just be “drier storage” instead, or better yet, “non traditional storage” or some such.

There’s definitely some financial interests involved here as well — “dry storage” has made a lot of people a good bit of money. But as tea drinkers, it is perhaps important to remember that ultimately — we are going to drink our teas.

Puerh storage has generally been classified as dry and wet. Of course, dry and wet are absolutes, and nothing in reality really operates like that. It’s more like a sliding scale of wetness — from bone dry (say, sticking it in the desert) to extreme wetness (say, immersed in water). It’s obvious that neither of those are desirable, but how much wetness is good?

I’ve been thinking about this problem recently because I’m been fretting over how to store my tea in Hong Kong. Hong Kong has a reputation for being humid. It is also the place where all these fabled wet stored teas are from. I myself have drank many such teas. They’re fine. They can be quite tasty. They’re, by some accounts, how puerh should taste. I’ve met quite a few extremely experienced tea drinkers in Hong Kong who hold this view.

Then you have the dry storage proponents, who say that wet storage fundamentally changes the tea in a negative way. You can’t get rid of the “storage” smell. The tea is less “lively”. You trade in the “liveliness” and the “freshness” for sweetness and smoothness. Many people who sell new cakes are people who will talk about this as if it’s the gospel. That, also, has a large following and many believe this to be the best way to proceed.

As with most things that have to do with taste, however, there’s probably no one real truth behind this. What I think there are though are misconceptions.

What happens to the cake I think is two fold. Since we know that mould grows on the tea when in wet storage, it’s obvious that those are part of the process of turning a tea into a sweet, mellow brew. There’s also, of course, oxidation that must be going on all the time. Pure oxidation, however, probably doesn’t work so well, since teas stored in very dry areas tend to perform poorly. I’ve had some that were truly hideous. So, the trick must be to get enough moisture to get the little mould spores going, but not too much so that it overwhelmes the tea…

What a lot of people in China, especially in the north, believe is that any sort of wetness is bad, and that the tea must be really dry. This is why I’ve tried the really dry teas — people who literally rented storage spaces in places with desert like conditions. The teas suck in those cases. Truly wet teas end up being a little boring and a little flat, and sometimes can taste too much of the storage and lose its charm. “Dry storage” as proposed then must really mean “wet, but only a bit”. After all, places like Hong Kong and Taiwan are quite wet to begin with. You don’t get a really dry environment unless you do serious climate control, and as far as I know, most of the dry storage facilities for tea merchants in these places are not climated controlled, only mediated by things like closed windows and sealed entrances.

What are the conditions that would produce the optimal amount of bioactivity, without overwhelming the tea and at the same time without it being too slow so as to make the whole exercise pointless? Somebody really ought to do experiments to figure this out. How about fluctuations in the humidity? I would think that fluctuations allow the tea to go in and out of the bio-enhanced aging phase. So sometimes it’s just oxidation, and sometimes it’s both. That, I suppose, must change the way it ages compared to a constant humidity environment. What, again, does it actually do? I’d imagine it can’t be that difficult to figure out.

Meanwhile… I am just praying disaster won’t befall my stash of tea.

I’m trying to find a permanent home for my teas here.

One problem — the only suitable cupboard in the entire house smells.. like wood. Whatever wood it’s made of…. it’s got this smell that doesn’t seem to go away and reappears when I close the door. It’s the best place because it’s quite closed, is away from a window, and is the perfect size.

I don’t really like the idea of having my teas soak up the smell of the wood. In fact, in this case a cheap MDF board cupboard might be preferable, since those are usually pretty quick to dissipate their smell after a little while. The fact that it uses real wood is making it more problematic…

Any ideas on how to handle the smell problem? I fear this might not go away permanently 🙁