TeaChat

What if there is a perfect storage place for aging puerh and wine, almost like a cellar but for puerh? Might be a membership only place with a monthly charge for storing people's puerh.... Plus a private tea lounge next to it, for enjoying the result with a couple of friends? Will it works?

A control 72% hum. / 62 F / bi-monthly air flow and personally check-ups for any sign of problem. Dividing sections by each mountain/area and Cooked / Raw, Younger / older. How much will you pay for this service? Just a thought....

TIM wrote:How much will you pay for this service?

Not much at all. I'd rather take my chances doing it myself.

Nice thought, though.

The tea lounge sounds pretty nice. I guess this would be a chain with branches in all the major US cities... like Gainesville, Florida!

The Best Tea House in Hong Kong started this concept/action in 2004. I think they have now 3 branches in HK and China. Quite successful. What they do is to have their customer buy puerh from them and store it for them for $30 a year, providing them with a private tea lounge for party or tasting (extra fee). Since then many copycats have surface....

TIM wrote:The Best Tea House in Hong Kong started this concept/action in 2004...

The Best Tea House rocks! Always ahead of the curve.

30 dollars a year for storage per cake?

i think is the membership fee. $30 a year, not per cake, make no sense if so?

TIM wrote:i think is the membership fee. $30 a year, not per cake, make no sense if so?

So they will store away as much pu as you want for the $30 membership fee?

Since I live in PA the climate is nothing special for puerh, If I could have a place like that for that price and reasonable access whenever, Yes I would use it, as long as my cakes are insured through the storage provided though. I would much rather keep my own though. I still dont understand, If your humidity is about 50% will the cakes "die". I know they wont age fast or anything but will they always be in that state, or will they just shrivel up and become undrinkable?

to age or not to age, that is the old question.....

Hey guys - if enough are interested, I'll talk to these folks in my town and see if we can work out a deal - a bunker 100 feet down... should survive when the big one hits too. check out the video link - humidity and temperature control to boot...

http://www.springfieldunderground.com/

What Best Tea has that the US doesn't is.....

Lots of Puerh Drinkers.


Another angle... I pay for storage, etc now, I just buy good aged cakes after tasting them. If you do the cost amortization, etc I think you would find that this idea is more expensive than just buying aged cakes. Fortunately for Best Tea there are a lot of people who can't do math.

TIM wrote:What if there is a perfect storage place for aging puerh and wine, almost like a cellar but for puerh? Might be a membership only place with a monthly charge for storing people's puerh.... Plus a private tea lounge next to it, for enjoying the result with a couple of friends? Will it works?

A control 72% hum. / 62 F / bi-monthly air flow and personally check-ups for any sign of problem. Dividing sections by each mountain/area and Cooked / Raw, Younger / older. How much will you pay for this service? Just a thought....

I think there was some talk about this on the lj community http://community.livejournal.com/puerh_tea/199484.html. Some interesting points were made here. I think it's a great idea, but there are some issues that makes it not-so-practical for a lot of people.

I know Phyll keeps his in a wine cellar type space. One thing he mentioned about that is that it's hard to say how tea will age there, since the temperature and humidity for wine are kept pretty controlled and consistent.

I think you might not want to have *too* consistent temperature / humidity. I've seen it mentioned a number of places (including in Cloud's book) that even though puer doesn't like rapid changes / fluctuations (i.e., within a single day), it won't ferment well without some periods of high humidity / heat as well as some periods of lower humidity and less heat.

I've been happy that LA has been a bit more humid than usual this summer - near my house, it's been registering 58-70% RH most days, especially in the morning. So I try to open the door of my tea closet a bit when it's humid out, and recently it's been smelling pretty nice and strong, which is a nice change. Even though LA isn't a great place to store puer, I've been just kind of trying to watch and see what happens to the small amounts of tea I have.

If I were more serious about collecting / aging tea long term, I'd probably have to either move, store stuff at my parents' house in Jersey, or invest in some better humidification techniques.

what if a huge meteorite smashes the earth in the not too distant future?

Wesli and I and a few other were actually toying around with this idea some time back. That would be a great idea!