Tea in tins

[shesallthat]

How long will tea stay fresh in tins..a year...6 months? Sometimes I am tempted to buy a large amount of my favorite but not sure if I will go through it fast enough. At what point do they start going bad

[hooksie]

This actually depends on the tea itself mainly, some aging well others going stale.

Greener teas will lose their freshness after a while, however black teas and pu-erhs last much longer and in many cases get better with age.

[xuancheng]

This actually depends on the tea itself mainly, some aging well others going stale.

Greener teas will lose their freshness after a while, however black teas and pu-erhs last much longer and in many cases get better with age.

This Sunday I just got a nice Yunnan black tea from 2005. The owner of the teashop kept it in a big paper bag on the shelf for almost 4 years. I was quite surprised, but it is very nice still.

[Chip]

Many tins are far from air tight.

[shesallthat]

So the answer is....?

[Chip]

So the answer is....?

... that there is no answer ... well, no simple answer. Time and experience will tell you what you can do to your own satisfaction based on your tastes and environmental conditions.

Blacks will certainly last longer in tins, often several years.
Darker oolongs can improve with age, greener ones are generally better used sooner than later.
Greens and whites are best used generally as soon as possible.

[cinaussi]

I personally recommand to keep green and white tea maximum 1 year as most the of the company selling it have it already stored for a while. Therefore, it's important to know of which harvest your tea is. Concerning Pu Erh, it's indeed a very well aging type of tea when it's been put int he right conditions (dry and cool place.) This is also the case for some black or semi-fermented tea such as Da Hong Pao for instance. The whole thing is to make sure your tea is not put on a shelve in the sun Should you chose to put it in the fridge, make sure it's well sealed as tea tends to soak up all kinds of tastes and smells from its surroundings.

[gingkoseto]

It depends on what your favorite tea is.

There is a dan cong I love, and I am thinking of buying 2 lb. of it for the next a few years. But I won't do it for many other teas.

[reincarnate]

This actually depends on the tea itself mainly, some aging well others going stale.

Greener teas will lose their freshness after a while, however black teas and pu-erhs last much longer and in many cases get better with age.

This Sunday I just got a nice Yunnan black tea from 2005. The owner of the teashop kept it in a big paper bag on the shelf for almost 4 years. I was quite surprised, but it is very nice still.

That's really strange, I would think it would pick up all the smells from its surroundings by now...

[xuancheng]

That's really strange, I would think it would pick up all the smells from its surroundings by now...

Well, it was kept between two other large bags of tea, inside a teashop, so the only other smells are other teas. It could have been a lot worse.

[theteascoop]

I just take a whiff. If it smells like dust, it's stale. It's not going to hurt you from being old, it just won't taste good. That's the best way to find out.

[brad4419]

Im just getting into oolongs so this is very interesting, So what Im reading here is that greener Oolongs such as bai zhong or TGYs should be drank relatively quick after opening? More roasted oolongs like wu yi rock oolongs improve with age(probably only to a certain point) if properly stored in tins?

I searched and found this http://www.teachat.com/viewtopic.php?f= ... ha#p127326 but this thread talks about ageing Oolongs. Im asking more about storing Oolongs for around 1-2 years before I can drink it all, not aging for 10+ years.

I use rishi's black tins and am very happy with them. http://www.rishi-tea.com/store/black-fi ... -tins.html

[wyardley]

Greener oolongs will age well too (in my opinion, at least), though they need to be carefully sealed and / or re-roasted if you're in a humid climate. They will change more dramatically than heavier fire tea.

There is a kind of awkward stage for most oolongs (heavy-roasted or not) where they just taste stale.

So what Im reading here is that greener Oolongs such as bai zhong or TGYs should be drank relatively quick after opening

While the current style is for low-roast or unroasted teas, there are plenty of examples of baozhongs or tieguanyin that are more traditionally processed. Likewise, there are yancha that are processed more in the newer style.

[Intuit]

I suspect that a threshold level of initial leaf oxidation is required for teas to undergo an aging process. I am also wondering if some cultivars are more capable of undergoing these reactions than others. In other words, these teas are inherently enriched in key fractions of whatever is donating electrons to form age-related condensates. I strongly suspect Yunnan teas are an example, and it may well be that certain metals taken up into leaves help the dark-phase oxidation process along. Yunnan mountains are known throughout the mining world for rich deposits.

An apt analogy can be found in the mother of all 'aged' plant condensates, asphalt. Asphalts, a complex mix of large fused ring condensates, undergoes metal-catalyzed dark-phase (in the absence of light) oxidation over the course of years, assisted by loss of the volatiles fraction (hardening) and slow infiltration of moisture through surface cracks into the ashpalt void spaces.

True nonmicrobially-assisted aging is a very slow, predominately aerobic process, as most pu and aged oolong drinkers well know.

Loss of smokey 'bite', in the case of, say, Souchong or Keemun, is probably a different situation - slow rate desorption of whatever bitter volatiles were taken up by teas when they were dried over wood smoke, pine pitch or coals during heat processing. Thus the observed 'softening', loss of bite, over time. Not true aging.

One well known tea vendor has an aged pouchong for sale (as in decades old). Saw it mentioned yesterday while trolling for info on stability of baozhong, as in trying to decide if its worthwhile purchasing a 2008 baozhong of questionable freshness at full price or going for a 2009 harvest. It's HIGHLY irritating to have a vendor airily assure you of their barely oxidized tea (inherently low stability) 'freshness' when the product was vacuum-sealed- not under inert nitrogen gas - nearly a year and half ago. That's soooo 1990s technology - especially given the price of this tea.

Anyway, chemical aging in an air tight tin is Slooooowwwwww, and rate limited by catalyst concentration. It's probably not going to occur to any great extent over the course of years because of the relative dryness of tea leaves and lack of adequate electron donors (eg., leaf cell wall structural polymer oxidation). A very high percentage of the dry leaf mass is cell wall, and most of that are carbohydrate structural polymers, with a much smaller fraction of proteins and lipids in the mix. Pretty stable when dry if decomposing enzymes were shut down.

Hence the mystery of aged baozhong, a tea with low (oxidation in the low teens) percentage of the fraction necessary to catalyze condensation reactions.

[TomVerlain]

rather a "radical" post -