You know, about the zhong cha. My friend that owns a tea shop in the city has repeatedly told me, that in china labels mean nothing.
yes, they are good for us tea types to try and track and identify stuff. But according to him, labels mean nothing. Aside from counter fitting, I don't believe that in china they have the same copyright laws as we do. So I think anyone can use the zhong cha logo.
Just my 2c
I think that is beginning to change. You see on this beeng from Puerhshop a trademark for zhong cha and a reference to the license in yellow.Jeremy wrote:You know, about the zhong cha. My friend that owns a tea shop in the city has repeatedly told me, that in china labels mean nothing.
yes, they are good for us tea types to try and track and identify stuff. But according to him, labels mean nothing. Aside from counter fitting, I don't believe that in china they have the same copyright laws as we do. So I think anyone can use the zhong cha logo.
Just my 2c
this is kind of frustrating too at the same time. the usage of the generic wrapper tells me one thing : that before 1997, pu erh tea was just that : a pu erh tea. i guess that the chinese did not care from what mountain the tea was from, the harvest and other pertinent details which we do see now on the new wrappers. no recipe numbers...all that stuff. the only distinguishing thing were the different colour marks. the tea sign.hop_goblin wrote:Before '97 all puerh production was supervised and regulated under the CNNP as all factories were still considered state owned. As a result of China's socilalistic business affairs, all state owned factories had a uniform way of producing puerh regardless of factory and this means wrapping which includes the zhong cha logo. Although the Zhong logo is still used today, it is primarly used for nostalgic reasons than any regulatory decree.wyardley wrote:I don't know, but I would assume any factories that were under CNNP control before privatization (i.e., Menghai, Xiaguan, Kunming, etc.) would be able to use the 8中 logo legally. And it seems clear that other organizations currently use the logo as well (probably without "official" approval).Salsero wrote:So who does this stupid zhong cha logo belong to and what does it mean? It's CNNP, Xiaguan, and bunches of tiny factories who don't spring for their own wrappers and are the opposite of the enormous CNNP and Xiaguan.
this is what gets me about paying $100 bucks or more for a cake with cnnp wrappers that are claiming to be good pu erh tea. how can you know though since good and so so and bad tea were wrapped with the generic wrappers? someone told me that you can tell from looking at the cake itself. for sure you can tell by drinking the tea.
Well the baskets had the trading codes and batch numbers (if not the tongs), and I am pretty sure merchants (at least some) kept track (that's not to say that merchants didn't then, as now, mis-represent cakes, either deliberately or accidentally). People within the tea industry may also have had a sense of what areas which teas came from, though I imagine a lot of it was plantation grown tea.heavydoom wrote: this is kind of frustrating too at the same time. the usage of the generic wrapper tells me one thing : that before 1997, pu erh tea was just that : a pu erh tea. i guess that the chinese did not care from what mountain the tea was from, the harvest and other pertinent details which we do see now on the new wrappers. no recipe numbers...all that stuff. the only distinguishing thing were the different colour marks. the tea sign.
And of course there are little differences that can give you a pretty good idea of when the cake was produced or which factory it was from, if you have a lot of knowledge about it. These are things like whether it has the hollow in the back or not, the size and shape of certain characters, the type of writing on the front and whether there's English writing or not, the color of the 茶 character on the wrapper and internal ticket, thickness and type of the paper, etc. A lot of these things are easy to fake, but they would be easy to fake whether or not labels were standardized.
Despite the best efforts of CNNP to make everything more or less the same, or at least standardized, there are clear difference between factories / batches.
But as you say, drinking the tea and (to a lesser extent, looking at it) are the best ways to tell. And in that sense, it's kind of liberating that all of these teas look very similar - it forces you to decide on your own what's good tea and what's not. It can make shopping for older tea a little overwhelming at times, though, especially if you don't carry around an encyclopedic knowledge of these minute differences in your head.
And hey, even if the newer wrappers provide information, that information can easily be inaccurate or misleading, or the wrappers can be faked, or switched from another tea. Or the information can be correct but the tea bad, or the storage bad. So, overwhelming as it is, developing your palate and developing confidence in your own decisions is probably the best way to buy pu'er tea. That or listen to the opinions of someone who knows more than you do - that won't necessarily guarantee you'll get tea that's to your taste, but can at least push you in the right direction.