A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘young puerh’

Dumping bad samples

February 27, 2013 · 17 Comments

Despite the title of this blog, I actually only drink one tea a day, unless I happen to be visiting a tea store. Generally, when I’m by myself, I brew up one and only one tea, and will drink it until I feel there’s not much left, or when I get bored of it. For years I documented this meticulously on a daily basis, although starting a few years ago, I felt that it was oftentimes more obligatory than anything, without anything to add – nobody really wants to read about my daily tea drinking habits, after all. So, I stopped, and this blog became more about tea drinking culture and my thoughts on tea. The one-tea-a-day habit, however, remains.

Recently though, I have started dumping teas. I have lots of samples – either through purchase or through gifts from others. Samples of tea, as I’m sure most of you know, can be great, ok, or bad. Unless it’s really obvious, like some David Lee Hoffman huangpian that someone sent me, usually you can’t quite tell if something is going to be bad or even horrible. You can only really tell once you brew it – at which point, going by my old rule, it would be too late. I used to endure such teas, and write the day off as just a bad tea day. Now though, I decided I’m not going to waste my caffeine quota drinking stuff like this, and so instead, I dump them.

Today was one such day. It started out with me trying, finally, Hster’s oddly named Economic Corridors cake. I don’t like it. It has that weird taste that suggests to me it’s got something funny going on, although I can’t quite pinpoint what’s wrong with it. What I do know is I’ve tasted this before, and it’s not a sign of a tea that will age well. It has some attractive qualities, but underlying is a bitterness and staleness that turns me off. Looking at the leaves though, you can’t really tell

Nor does the brewed tea in the first infusion tell you something is definitely off

So, instead of waiting around, after a few infusions I just decided to move on – I don’t want this to be my last tea of today.

The wise thing would actually to jump into something I know that will deliver, but instead, I took another gamble and tried another sample that was sent to me, this time from a new outfit called Origin Tea. The tea is supposedly Yibang from a Taiwanese shop called Guangyang Hao. They have a nonexistent web presence, so I really have no idea who they are (sorry, no pictures, as it was getting dark)

The tea is better – not the greatest, but certainly better, and more puerh like than the Economic Corridors cake. It’s gotten past that initial hump, and tastes full enough and rich enough so that I think it will at least not deteriorate, which should at least be the minimum standard.

Then I’m reminded of why I usually only drink one tea a day – I think the two teas was a little too much for me, for one person to consume comfortably. There just isn’t a good balance between drinking decent teas and trying new things. Smaller pots, as some might suggest, is not really an option either – I dislike using smaller pots. So perhaps, next time I should just be more decisive and throw out bad tea after two or three infusions, instead of five or six. After all, there’s always, always, more tea to drink.

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Microclimates

February 15, 2013 · 1 Comment

First of all, I wish you all a happy lunar new year, and that the year of the snake may be a fruitful one.

Continuing the theme from the last post, I thought it is also worth mentioning that storage climates are not just dependent on big things – local climate of the city where you’re at, or even the area you live in, but also heavily dependent on how your room, your closet, or even that cardboard box on the ground where you put your tea – how those things may affect your storage conditions.

One of the things that I see people asking sometimes on tea forums and the like is whether or not it is safe to drink from leaves that were left around overnight. Usually, the answer offered by myself or others is “it’s probably ok”. In my personal experience, that has most certainly been the case.

There are, however, differences that may even affect that answer, and consequently, probably affects how one stores teas as well. For example, in my old office I normally drank tea grandpa style, and I would usually leave the spent leaves until the next day to clean up in the morning when I get there again. No problems there. At my current office I do the same thing, except now, at my new office, after a weekend the tea leaves would get moldy, quite seriously so in fact. It does make me wonder how safe it is to drink leaves that have been sitting here for a whole day.

More importantly, I’d imagine something like this is indicative of significant differences in how tea stored in these different environments will behave, especially if stored over long periods of time. Right now, I have one small cake I am storing here for immediate consumption. That won’t show much change, I think, at least not before I finish it. However, if I say store some teas here long term, I’d imagine this is a much more humid environment, and the tea will probably age a bit faster – but at the risk of getting moldy more easily. Maybe I ought to try it out and see what happens.

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Storing is for the long haul

January 29, 2013 · 13 Comments

A few months ago a reader of the blog emailed me with a problem. She is newish to puerh, and has been buying some cakes since 2011. She bought some clay jars to store the teas in, and in the hopes of speeding up the aging process, decided to try to add a bit of humidity to the jars to make things go faster/age better. This much sounds familiar – lots of people do similar things, especially if they live in drier climates, because, well, they worry about the tea not aging properly. These are the jars.

Then the inevitable happened – first, signs of yellow mold, which can be dusted off easily and stopped the addition of humidity to the tea (by some method of adding water to the clay and let the clay soak it up, I believe). Then, a more invasive problem appeared – bugs, little bugs, that were all over the cakes, especially one, but it was showing up on others too. She threw out the most heavily infested one, but now almost all the cakes have bugs in them, and they move fast and run away from light, what to do?

In desperation, she emailed me to ask – what’s a good way to handle them? She threw one of the cakes with bugs away, but there were more. Another she put in a freezer, hoping that it will kill the bugs. Was microwave a possible way of killing them? Something else?

I think a little perspective is useful sometimes, because I’ve met others who have had similar reactions before. Puerh, when you buy them new, are, well, an investment of sorts. If your plan is to store them and drink them in the future, chances are your time horizon is years, if not decades. If that’s the case, even momentary infestations of all kinds of nasties will go away. Some, like mold, may leave a permanent mark on how your tea tastes. Others, like little bugs, will barely make a dent in your tea, if you manage to get rid of them. So, when you run into problems like this, the first thing to do is not to panic, unless you spent your life savings on the tea and your life depended on it. If it’s just a hobby – there are ways to fix the problem. What not to do is to overreact and put the tea in, say, the microwave and permanently destroy it. That will really end the tea’s aging potential and cause irreparable harm.

Since in this case it was obviously the wet jars and the attendant humidity that was causing the problem, I suggested the reader to take all the cakes out of the jars, and then separate the cakes into two piles – ones with bugs and ones without. The ones without, just store them on a shelf or something. The ones with the bugs I suggested perhaps putting them somewhere, spread out, and just let them air out. Usually, bugs like these that live on puerh cakes tend to love the humidity, and are mostly after the paper. Once it gets too dry they will go away, especially if it’s not a dark humid space. I had bugs like this on some bricks I bought some years ago, and after a few months all the bugs were gone, and I didn’t even do anything special to get rid of them.

So, happily, the reader wrote back to me a few weeks ago saying that the bugs were, indeed, all gone. No more problems, and the tea is probably a bit dry, but certainly better off than in some uncontrolled humid environment with a high risk of mold and bugs. They’re going back into the jar, but without any added humidity this time. I think the aging will be slow, but there’s only so much you can do with natural climate.

This is not the first time I’ve encountered folks with storage problems that were man-made. Usually the root of the problem is the desire to somehow replicate a more humid, hotter environment so the tea will age faster, but that is not so easy, and the risks of failure also increases dramatically when you pursue such projects. I am an advocate of simple solutions, such as, say, adding a bowl of water to a storage cabinet, but anything more and I’d be weary. If you do pursue such projects, monitor the changes very closely. Mold can grow on all kinds of places, but on tea cakes, they generally start at the end of the stems, so watch those carefully. They can also be in some corner of your storage unit in that long forgotten tuo sitting in the back – and that can fester and kill your whole stash.

You can never really replicate the storage conditions of a giant warehouse with hundreds of jians of tea. Just today I was walking by Lam Kie Yuen and saw them loading up a truck for delivery. There were probably 200 jian of puerh in that truck, meaning there were close to 17000 cakes in there. Storage that amount of tea and storing 20 at home are not the same thing, and they have decades of storage management experience to back them up. So, proceed carefully, and if anything goes wrong, don’t panic. Airing out the tea for six months will solve most of the problems.

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2007 Sunsing Yiwu

January 21, 2013 · 20 Comments

This is a cake of Yiwu tea, supposedly, that’s quite cheap and decent. It’s from 2007, right around the time of the craziest prices during the bubble, although in retrospect, the prices weren’t that crazy – it’s crazier now, believe it or not.

There’s not much that they told me about this tea, other than it’s from Yiwu, and that it’s some sort of arbor tree tea – not old tree, mind you. It’s only 250g, but it’s the price of a run of the mill cake. The thing is, this tea is pretty decent – better than a lot of stuff out there that’s 5 years old and selling for far more. So, why buy those?

Of course, this tea doesn’t have a fancy background. Nobody, as far as I know, has reviewed it and deemed it good, so no one’s chasing after it, making its likelihood of appreciation low. It is not exactly the most exciting thing out there in terms of taste, but that’s really not much of an indictment. A lot of teas that I’ve tasted recently that are from the past few years are positively awful – just not very good, especially when factoring in the price of such things. Unlike say five years ago, nowadays just finding something decent is difficult without needing to pay through the roof. Increasingly, I find it a better deal to look for something a bit aged, and among those, pick and choose the ones that are not as famous. Chances are, there are decent teas out there that can be had for not a lot of money. This cake is one of them.

I think this tea was perhaps stored in a slightly humid environment, but not quite a traditional storage – there isn’t a noticeable storage taste to the tea. It’s got decent throatiness, reasonable body and fragrance.

Yet chances are, cakes like this will languish in the stores that made them, and I can go back a few years later and it will still be priced at more or less the same price as it is now, maybe adding a bit of inflation, etc. I see cakes here that are being sold at the same price as they were four or five years ago, and for these non-famous cakes, I don’t see that changing anytime soon. So remember that for every cake out there that has gone through stratospheric increases in prices, there are probably a few dozens that have been sitting at the same level for ages. For those of us not in the business of speculating on puerh, these are the things we can buy to enjoy.

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2005 Chenguanghe Tang Menghai Yesheng and storage conditions

December 13, 2012 · 10 Comments

Some of you might remember this post, where I talked about the differences between what I had and what a tea friend Ira had bought. The tea is Chen Zhitong’s 2005 Chenguanghe Tang Menghai Yesheng. Chen Zhitong didn’t press this cake himself – it was supposedly something that another factory made, but he just bought the whole lot and rewrapped it in his wrapper.

The differences between the two cakes look like night and day – one looks a bit fuzzy and probably moldy, whereas mine doesn’t. Hster ended up sending me a sample of Ira’s wet version, so I finally got to try it.

I didn’t take any photos, but the results are, to say the least, interesting. First of all, the tea looks and tastes like a traditionally stored tea. The leaves, when brewed, are of a brownish red hue, as any traditionally stored tea would. The liquor is dark, very dark. The taste includes some of that sharp-ish taste that you expect from something that came out of traditional storage not too long ago. If you put it side by side with my version of the same tea, you wouldn’t recognize them as the same thing. Storage conditions, as we all know, does matter.

The tea from Ira, right now, is not the most interesting nor good. The taste from the storage is a bit sharp, and a bit pungent. However, I can tell that this tea has legs, and it has a good body. Give it a few years, after airing out for some time, I think, and it will taste quite decent. It is entirely possible that ten years from now, Ira will have a good, tasty cake to drink. In fact, I think for someone who lives in the cold Bay Area, having something like this may actually be better, long term, than trying to dry-store your own cakes. Those may taste young forever, whereas something like this may age quite gracefully over time.

Of course, the character of the tea has been changed permanently, and they are on fundamentally different courses for aging. What this tea has lost in storage is the fragrance of the naturally stored version. On the other hand, it gained a heaviness that is otherwise absent. Whether you like one or the other is really up to you.

The real mystery, though, is what happened – did Guang’s lot just go through traditional storage at some point? That seems doubtful. It’s also possible that some of his did, while others didn’t. I’m honestly not sure what happened, and I’m surprised he didn’t mention that his cakes have been in more humid storage. In fact, I wonder if he even knows it, if, for example, a new tong he opened happened to be from a different source under a different storage condition.

Either way, it was a most interesting sample.

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Saturday tasting with friends

December 1, 2012 · 3 Comments

I was going to meet Tim from the Mandarin’s Tearoom today at this place, but by the time I got there Tim had to go already, so missed him. On the menu today:

1) Some random, new puerh that’s pressed into these chocolate shaped squares. Awful, awful tea. Tastes like green tea, and completely lacking in any sort of real aftertaste. It’s probably Lincang tea. Not sure of its cost, but this isn’t going to end well. Avoid newfangled pressing techniques, really.

2) Chenyuanhao 07 Laobanzhang – this tea is a disappointment. After last week’s pretty awesome Yiwu, I was expecting quite a bit, but this tea, well, isn’t that good. It’s not awful, but it doesn’t compare to the Yiwu offering. Well, I guess Mr. Chen does spend all his time in Yiwu overseeing his productions there, because clearly he wasn’t in Lao Banzhang.

3) Mid 2000s private pressing Yiwu from some shop in Macau. This is a private pressing, made with probably Yiwu materials. It’s nice, expensive, but also a bit off – it’s a bit rough and thin, and not very interesting. The person who brought the sample said this is not how it usually tastes, and we suspect the prolonged wetness in the weather recently has something to do with it. I wouldn’t buy it based on this one tasting, but maybe there’s more to it than that.

4) 2003 Henry Trading “Serious Formula”. Hou De had this tea for a little while. This is not a bad tea. It’s punchy. This is a naturally stored version. It’s still relatively cheap, I believe, for a lightly traditionally stored version, but I’m not sure how much it is now for the natural storage ones, but I’m pretty sure it’s cheaper than some newfangled gushu cakes from 2012. It’s nice, but there are lots of teas like it and so if it’s expensive at all, might not be worth the trouble.

5) 1992 Brick, unknown origin. Nice, decent aged taste. Not the best thing in the world, and considering it’s a brick… not much you can ask for. Supposedly a private pressing, although seems a little early for that sort of thing. I only got to try the tail end of the tea, so my comments on this is skewed.

6) 1950s Red Label. It’s hard to comment on something like this, since it’s THE benchmark for all subsequent teas. This is probably the driest stored Red Label I’ve had – no hint of traditional storage. It’s very refreshing, still, and quite nice. Reminds me of some of the gushu stuff that you can get now, but of the best quality – really a tea that is worth drinking, but maybe not at the price that these things now go for. It was brewed a bit weak. Nevertheless, good tea, obviously.

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Saturday tastings with friends

November 24, 2012 · 16 Comments

For the past few months I’ve been spending some Saturday afternoons with a couple who run a small tea shop and who press their own cakes every year. The wife is the 3rd generation from a tea family, and they have been in this line of work for a long time, with the tea to go with it, I should add. I enjoy drinking tea with them, partly because unlike lots of people in the tea business here, they’re quite willing to share their thoughts on particular teas frankly. I drink a lot of samples of various things with them, since it’s always good to get second and third (and sometimes more) opinions on teas.

Yesterday I went as usual, and had five teas, in chronological order of when the teas are supposed to have been produced:

1) 2010 Youle, producer unknown, private pressing – nice, strong, a bit rough, but pretty good tea, if it weren’t so damn expensive (something like 700 RMB for a cake)

2) 2008 Chenyuanhao Yiwu Gushu mushroom – awesome, juicy, thick, very Yiwu, maybe slightly too soft in approach, but very good and full. Stored in Malaysia throughout, it still tastes young, probably because it’s a mushroom, but it’s going to turn a corner soon and it’s going to be a good tea.


The Henglichang in a cup

3) 1997 Henglichang Bulang. So we meet at last. This is a sample from a friend, and I believe the whole cake is now sold out. There are lots of reviews online, so colour me prejudiced. The tea is bitter, very bitter, without the bitter transforming into anything sweet. It is not traditionally stored, as some have suspected – it has the colour, but none of the taste. Something is weird, and my friend commented that it might be a mix of different teas pressed together to make something look more aged. We stuck with it for many infusions, although the later ones we only had a small sip each. There’s no real complexity and offers none of the surprises of a well aged tea. After trying this, now I know why this tea is a complete unknown this side of the Pacific. There are lots of options for late 90s teas, and this one isn’t a representative example of a good one.

4) Early 90s Yiwu from David Lee Hoffman. David Lee Hoffman probably needs no introductions. I’ve had a few teas from him before, usually coming via friends who send me samples of what they bought, although the last time I tried his teas was before he started the Phoenix Collection. I can’t seem to find this on his tea list, and I think it’s this thing. This tea has very little taste, and what little it does have suggests something no older than 3-4 years. It has a very thin body, no aftertaste, and no real aroma to speak of. Calling this “tea” is a bit charitable. There are two possibilities – either you believe Hoffman’s claims that this tea is from the early 90s, in which case you should never buy aged teas from him because (judging from this and other examples I’ve had) his cave is where puerh goes to die, or you don’t believe his age claims, in which case you shouldn’t be buying this in the first place. Either way, the conclusions are the same. I don’t care how many years he’s been in the business, but I’ve never had a tea that tastes anything like what a puerh can be given his age claims. You’re better off buying something three years old from Yunnan Sourcing.

Top right – Henglichang, bottom right – Chenyuanhao, left – Hoffman

5) 80s 7582 cooked. This tea has been naturally stored, and frankly, not terribly interesting. It’s nice, smooth, tasty, and the leaves were originally relatively lightly cooked, but really, I’d rather pay $25 USD for a two or three years old Dayi that has lost its pondy taste than paying hundreds for an 80s cooked that tastes only slightly better. The value proposition is just not there for old cooked tea, especially if it hasn’t been through traditional storage. It’s for people who like to burn money.

6) 1960s Guangyungong. This is a tea from my friend’s family storage. Stored naturally throughout without ever having been in traditional storage, and it shows. The liquor is a golden colour, and aroma is quite nice and intense with a smooth aftertaste and good qi. Very elegant and pleasant to drink, and much more interesting in many ways than the usually heavily traditionally stored GYGs out there. Too bad it costs an arm and a leg, but it’s very nice tea.

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2003 Zipin hao

November 13, 2012 · 11 Comments

There are lots of cakes out there made by famous personages, most of whom are from Taiwan. The quality of these things vary from very good to very poor, especially when factoring in the price involved, which is almost always high, because there is usually a substantial premium charged for these things, precisely due to the fame of the person who made them. This cake, the Zipin hao from 2003, was made by Zhou Yu of Wistaria House.

I distinctly remember seeing this at Wistaria the first time I visited in 2005. Back then, my thought was “my god, this thing is expensive”, which it was. I can’t quite remember how much it was, but it was heads and shoulders above what a normal cake sold for back in the day, and being a poor graduate student, I balked and never bought it. Nor did I try it at the time, because instead I spent my money drinking some loose Tongqing hao from Wistaria instead. It was good, and the Zipin was forgotten.

I had picked up a cake of their 2007 Hongyin last time I visited, and this time I went back to Wistaria again during my most recent trip to Taipei, and remembered this cake. When I inquired how much, the price was shocking – shocking low, relatively speaking anyway for something approaching 10 years and made by a famous tea master. At 4200 NTD, it’s not cheap for a single cake, but compared to a lot of new stuff, its price is more than reasonable. I bought one.

The dry leaves really don’t look too good. The cake’s front looks like someone stomped on it. Six Famous Tea Mountains’ pressing skill was never great, and it’s evident here too. But then, we don’t judge teas by their looks.

How does it taste? One word – good. It’s got this nice, long lasting aftertaste. It has qi. It has body. I brewed it pretty light, because these days I’m trying to limit my caffeine intake, but the tea still delivered. It’s no longer youthful, and exhibits a taste that is typical of something that’s been around for its age and stored in a wettish climate. The wet leaves look good too.

At this point, one must wonder – why bother buying new cakes of teas that are the same price as this, when there’s something like this to be had? At the same price, you can have something from a reputable tea master aged 10 years, or you can buy some new cake of supposed old tree material (a sometimes questionable claim) and chance it ten years from now. To me, the choice seems pretty obvious.

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Taobao Lottery: “1995” “Cheshunhao”

November 2, 2012 · 2 Comments

Tea, unless it’s a gift, costs money. So when we talk about tea, like it or not, we have to mention the cost of the tea. When we say a tea is “good”, do we mean it’s good, full stop? Or is it good, for this price? Or good, at any price?

I am guessing when most of us are writing or reading reviews, we read “good” as being “good at this price”. So when someone writes about how a tea is very interesting, stimulating, multi-faceted, etc, and is really good, I suspect s/he is saying that it is really good at the current prices at which the tea is obtainable. It may also be written with no reference to prices at all, and may simply mean that “this tea is good in comparison with others of this type I’ve tried”. There are probably some teas that fall into the category of “good at any price”, but those teas, I’m afraid, are few and far between.

So when I am writing about tea, even when unspoken, I tend to be writing with the idea of “good, at this price” in mind. Some are unequivocally good, others need to be qualified, and when such qualifications are necessary, I usually state them clearly so that there is no misunderstanding or inflated expectations, especially if that’s a tea that can be had easily.

Such is the case with a cake I found recently on Taobao, and then I have briefly recommended on Teachat. This supposed Cheshunhao is basically a white-paper cake, which means that it provides almost no info on the maker. Sure, it has a name, and the seller claims a date, but as far as I am concerned, I’m buying the tea on its merits alone.

When I picked it it was almost a pure gamble. The vendor has a lot of impossibly cheap cakes. This thing’s claim of 1995 is, at best, questionable. Then again, it’s offered at a price that, at worst, represents a loss of $25 USD. I probably wouldn’t have bothered if I were still in the US, but since I now own a magic card that lets me buy direct, $25 isn’t the end of the world.

What I got was a cake that tasted old – old enough, anyway, for it to be more than worth the cost of admission. It has had some traditional storage, but that storage was a long time ago – at least 8 -10 years past. The cake takes like some similar cakes I’ve had from early 2000s, so while the claim of this being from 1995 may be a bit exaggerated, it’s not terribly far fetched – certainly not a three year old tea claiming to be 17. In Hong Kong, if I find a cake like this, it might cost me $80-100 USD. So, this price is very, very good, and the tea, while it has its flaws, is quite drinkable.

Is it the best tea out there? Heck no. I told TwoDog about this cake, and he bought a cake (or more?) for himself to try. He reports the tea also as being more than worthwhile, but he also found a lot of foreign objects in it. I haven’t yet – only a bit of human hair, which is almost de rigueur for older cakes that are cheap. The leaves are long and big – too long, in fact, and has a lot of woody stems. That aside, it’s not too bad.

What I would recommend this cake for are the following: 1) quaffing at the office, 2) drinking if you want something that tastes aged and does not break the bank, and 3) getting acquainted with something that has had a touch of traditional storage without an overpowering sense of storage mustiness. I think this cake fits the bill for those jobs, and I would strongly recommend it – based on the cake I tried and so long as it stays at this price.

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Aging puerh

October 22, 2012 · 21 Comments

Why do we store puerh? Why do you store puerh?

Let’s say you consume 10g of puerh a day. That’s a pretty generous amount for most people, since you’re likely to drink other kinds of teas, and 10g for personal consumption, assuming you don’t drink with others on a very regular basis, is quite a bit. So in a year, that’s 3.65kg, or just around 10 cakes of 357g each. In other words, to satisfy your annual puerh consumption of 10g a day, you need 10 cakes. If you are sitting on 100 cakes, and quite a few of us are, you are sitting on a ten year supply of tea. Clearly, that’s not tea meant for immediate drinking.

So many of us, if not almost all of us (shu drinkers who buy one or two cakes at a time and only re-up their supply don’t count) are buying puerh to age. There are of course a few possible reasons why that’s the case. The first, and is probably the most often cited one, is because we want to drink aged teas, but don’t want to pay aged tea prices. If we look at what the aged tea price involves, I think we can break it down to the following components

Aged tea price = original tea cost + time value of money + storage costs + scarcity premium + additional value of aged taste

So, naturally, a cake of tea that cost $100 in year 1 should, theoretically anyway, cost a little more in year 2, because the opportunity cost of forgoing the investment income from the $100 plus the storage cost should be worth something. In this current environment, the opportunity cost is pretty negligible, unless you happen to be a financial wizard. Storage cost, depending on your location, is always non-zero, but is also relatively negligible. So in year 2, your tea might be worth $102, and in year 3, $104, so on so forth. Of course, you may feel that a fairer measure would be inflation-indexed, so maybe you should benchmark the opportunity cost to inflation, rather than the returns on treasury notes. That might bump it up another percent or two, but still, not a whole lot.

The other things, however, are the kickers. The first, scarcity premium, is a real problem. For example, for teas that are well known but which were relatively limited in production, the price of the cake can be driven almost entirely by this premium. The Yuanyexiang that was made famous by a bunch of magazine and other writers online took off that way, and the prices are now something like 1000 RMB, for a tea that really isn’t all that great, even now, ten years later. When I bought them, it was almost 200 RMB. That was six years ago, and I thought it was pretty expensive. Has the tea improved so much that they are now worth 5x as much? No. It’s all about scarcity, and the fact that there are more people chasing the tea than there are teas available, so the prices keep going up and up, even though in recent years folks have started chasing other things and its price rise has stagnated.

We see similar movements in teas from regions that are considered good and low in production volume. Lao Banzhang old tree teas, for example, are in that category. There isn’t much of it to begin with, and so now anything that has a whiff of Lao Banzhang in it is priced astronomically, even when new. A lot of times they’re not even very good, or simply fake (using teas from neighbouring villages, etc). While the quality is there for the real stuff, a lot of it is not of that quality and is instead something inferior, but the scarcity premium is applied anyway.

Then there is the aged taste term, which I think is what we are all actually looking for when we store our own teas. We want our teas to age, and to age well, so that twenty years from now we have nice aged teas to drink. Many of us, especially those of us from or live in Asia, got started in this hobby because we tried incredible aged teas, and want to replicate that experience. The problem with this is twofold. The first is, in a lot of cases those aged taste may not be what you’ll end up getting in the end. Storing crap is not going to land you with a well aged tea, because crap only age into aged crap, not aged nectar. Picking out teas that will age well is not easy, and there are conflicting theories as to what will make a good aged tea. That’s a difficulty.

The second problem is that there are lots of risks with aging, and it has real costs disassociated with the time value of money and the storage costs. For example, you run the risk of ruin – mold, fire, flood, mice, children, among many other possible bad things that can happen to your tea. Some are recoverable, others not. A kid drooling on your cake is probably ok; the same kid decorating your cake with permanent marker, not ok. I know of at least a handful of friends who stored teas and have met unmitigated disasters during the process. It’s a real threat, not imaginary.

There are two other problems related to this. The first is one that I think will start manifesting itself in the coming years – some areas of the world just aren’t very good for storing tea. Kunming, for example, falls into this category, and I think some places, like Los Angeles, will as well. Hster’s samples from the Bay Area are not promising either. However, these things don’t show their colours until you’ve tried storing it there, for years, before they become apparent. Also, exact locations in the house, where the house is situated, and other micro-climate issues may affect the tea, positively or negatively.

The other problem is more fundamental – that the aged taste may not be to your taste. This, I think, is a real risk among many who come into this hobby not through the old tea way, but who start out drinking young teas and then only occasionally have access to one or two samples of older teas. Such drinkers might have a great appreciation of what younger puerh offers, and may very well be a very sophisticated drinker of young puerh. However, if they buy lots of tea, by definition not all of it will be consumed, and when aged, they might not be to the taste at all.

I’ve encountered folks like this in China. Some can tell me, with great precision, which village a tea is from. However, for the most part, they drink younger (10 years or less) teas on a regular basis, and have little experience with older teas, regardless of provenance or type. So they can get confused when presented with something older, aged in a more humid climate (not traditionally stored) or not of single village origin. For drinkers like this, I think the fun is in trying to figure out where things are from, in learning the different characteristics of the villages, etc, and not so much in the aging process. I’m not sure if it’s such a good idea for them to buy a lot of tea to age, because, frankly, they might not end up liking it.

To many, this is of course anathema to what puerh is about – puerh needs to be aged, and I generally agree with that. We do also need to recognize that the hobby is changing a bit, first from traditional storage to the proliferation of home natural storage, and now, to a different way of enjoying the hobby – trying to figure out origins, terroir, etc, things that are generally absent from the older teas because they were almost all big factory blends, unless you go all the way back to pre-1949 teas. I do think there’s a need to recognize and perhaps even separate the different sides of the hobby. When we say a tea is good, do we mean good now? Good later? Good to age? Under what conditions? For whom? I’m pretty sure a bitter, smoky tea stored for decades in, say, Alberta, is probably still going to be bitter, smoky twenty years hence. How many twenty years does one have in a lifetime?

Categories: Teas
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