Puerh Tea Regions and Aging Potential

[chrl42]

I am really new to Puerh so I need to learn.

Truth is not many people can affirm how each tea of different area can result in. Because it's not been long since they started to have 'Gushu'. Truth is those tributary Puerh during Qing or ROC's Hao Ji ones were not designed to age for drinking.

Wu Liang or Qian Jia Zhai's could be strong I assume? but their aged tastes really suck and that's why they are cheap.

Deal is to discover how those Menghai or Xiaguan's plantation teas have had camphor-ish fine tastes after all. My friend Pu seller said it could be due to 'master blenders' worked for Menghai. We all know Menghai's Yi Wu Zheng Shan Ye Sheng series is not really single-estate tea but blended.

Personally, for me it's that plantation traits. There's some typical plantation strongness from major factories, (astringent ones, not bitter ones) which I saw better results years later. That doesn't include any powers of Puerh Sheng or Gushu kinds...that's just my case. I haven't had many Gushus I personally store.

[shah82]

It's not really a mystery why we like a puerh tea. We simply want to keep drinking more of it. However, a good puerh tea often have complex, or to some, ineffable reason for why we want to drink more of it. The value system is more like Yancha than Anxi TGY or darjeeling or greens. Except that we don't roast these teas, nor do we ferment them like we do black teas, or we're not supposed to, anyways. There is also a great diversity in what qualities makes a good puerh, more so than there is in other categories of tea. I am trying to respect how people like different kinds of puerh tea in saying, simply, "strong character".

Take the Shuangjiang Mengku YuanYeXiang from 2001. It is all about that strong taste and aroma! It should be in high demand! However, while the price for this tea has been going up, it has been going up far slower than other comparable teas, and people like MarshalN has been reporting that interest in the tea has been declining due to poor perception of its aging qualities. It is by no means a bad tea though, just not more to it other than the taste and aroma, say, in comparison to the ChenGuangHeTang Menghai YiehSheng from 2005. Yet teas with weaker taste, like some banzhang teas, skyrocketed to unaffordable heights. There is a reason for that, just like there is a reason for the greater popularity of gushu teas as opposed to plantation.

Much of that is the aethetics generated by good gushu tea--which propagates more interest in better plantation care, better processing, etc, so that people can make better money off of their once low value tea plantations. Much of that is simple romanticism "Oh, look, an ancient tree that was around when Jesus Christ was still in swaddling cloths! Betcha the leaves tastes so awesome!" And while Yunnan produces quite a lot of tea, the amount of gushu that was both genuine and good is quite low compared to the demand, even if we're talking just the people who know what the qualities they are seeking when they buy gushu. There are about 25k cakes of pure spring LBZ every year, good, bad, otherwise. And the Banzhang area is relatively large. It only gets worse, right down to all of the fake Bingdao. This has largely meant that there is a confusion among the wider public about just what is gushu, and why is it so great? And let me be clear, however, sometimes you just want a plantation tea--easier to enjoy (Well, after ten years or so)!

chrl42, Most teas in the north will age relatively poorly compared to Banna teas. However, we do have some track record of the better stuff aging nicely, or at least in a way that one can appreciate, even if faulty (eventually goes hongcha, for instance). The good stuff is relatively rare, and people don't take quite as much effort into promoting and faking tea from that area. While I've never heard of any Wuliang tea being especially treasured (except for wild wild teas), most actual ancient plantations in XiaoJingGu are genuinely low in production and highly valued. Qianjiazhai, while in Wuliang, is one of those ancient plantations much like Osanzhai or Yangta, and collected together with them. Good Qianjiazhai wild wild tea is astronomically expensive. Good ancient plantation isn't really less so. It's just not as promoted as Kunlu or Bingdao or Xigui. Moreover, there are well known Changtai teas with such leaves in them that people honestly do appreciate.

[sung8891]

I've been collecting tea for a while now and in my experience gushu or yeh shen or any particular area /county is no guarantee a cake will age well. For a tea to age well it has also got to be correctly/well processed. And that's even before we talk about blending. The old Haoji chas , were mainly single region tea because in those days the artisans produced tea within the vicinity of their own villages. Transporting raw materials would have been a real pain , if not quite impossible on a daily basis in those days. So the old teas like song pin or Fook yuen cheong were single mountain Yiwu and kheng cheong hao from another mountain.

[kyarazen]

I've been collecting tea for a while now and in my experience gushu or yeh shen or any particular area /county is no guarantee a cake will age well. For a tea to age well it has also got to be correctly/well processed. And that's even before we talk about blending. The old Haoji chas , were mainly single region tea because in those days the artisans produced tea within the vicinity of their own villages. Transporting raw materials would have been a real pain , if not quite impossible on a daily basis in those days. So the old teas like song pin or Fook yuen cheong were single mountain Yiwu and kheng cheong hao from another mountain.

+1....
老兄，您在大马哪个地区？有机会交流交流。

[shah82]

Man, kyarazen, I really had to chuckle at your response in chinese...

[the_economist]

What's the chuckle for? He just asked which part of Malaysia sung was from.

[shah82]

Several reasons, but I don't want to get into 'em. I'm not attempting to be sarcastic or mean, though. Kyrazen will find out why, or not.

[kyarazen]

What's the chuckle for? He just asked which part of Malaysia sung was from.

these are the people whom i would love to meet and discuss/investigate tea together, especially if they've aged their own teas for decades themselves. they have the tea, the aging, their perspective on storage methods.

also still looking for anyone who has pumidored their tea for a decade or more to offer some tea for sale so that the performance can be evaluated. samples anyone? self stored please, i dont trust vendors as much.

[Exempt]

What's the chuckle for? He just asked which part of Malaysia sung was from.

also still looking for anyone who has pumidored their tea for a decade or more to offer some tea for sale so that the performance can be evaluated. samples anyone? self stored please

If you ever find this person I would also be interested in samples haha

[sung8891]

Hi , I'm from Malaysia and I speak a few Chinese dialects of which Mandarin is not one and I don't read Chinese. so you understood better than I did Shah , what kyrazen said.

[kyarazen]

Hi , I'm from Malaysia and I speak a few Chinese dialects of which Mandarin is not one and I don't read Chinese. so you understood better than I did Shah , what kyrazen said.

was asking which part of malaysia you're in, perhaps some day can visit you and chat tea/enjoy tea together.

[Tead Off]

Hi , I'm from Malaysia and I speak a few Chinese dialects of which Mandarin is not one and I don't read Chinese. so you understood better than I did Shah , what kyrazen said.

was asking which part of malaysia you're in, perhaps some day can visit you and chat tea/enjoy tea together.

this is the google translation of what you wrote: 'Dude, you are in Malaysia which region? Have the opportunity to share exchange'.

Often, google is more unintelligible.

[kyarazen]

Hi , I'm from Malaysia and I speak a few Chinese dialects of which Mandarin is not one and I don't read Chinese. so you understood better than I did Shah , what kyrazen said.

was asking which part of malaysia you're in, perhaps some day can visit you and chat tea/enjoy tea together.

this is the google translation of what you wrote: 'Dude, you are in Malaysia which region? Have the opportunity to share exchange'.

Often, google is more unintelligible.

the original text is more colloquial than the translated one though.

chinese sometimes can be hard to translate its like when it comes to yixing, there's some people that we would describe as 壶里壶涂，壶说八道, nothing intelligible comes out of it in google translation.

[chrl42]

Hi , I'm from Malaysia and I speak a few Chinese dialects of which Mandarin is not one and I don't read Chinese. so you understood better than I did Shah , what kyrazen said.

was asking which part of malaysia you're in, perhaps some day can visit you and chat tea/enjoy tea together.

this is the google translation of what you wrote: 'Dude, you are in Malaysia which region? Have the opportunity to share exchange'.

Often, google is more unintelligible.

the original text is more colloquial than the translated one though.

chinese sometimes can be hard to translate its like when it comes to yixing, there's some people that we would describe as 壶里壶涂，壶说八道, nothing intelligible comes out of it in google translation.

+1

I didn't know you understand Yixing teapot so truly deeply

[MarshalN]

I've been collecting tea for a while now and in my experience gushu or yeh shen or any particular area /county is no guarantee a cake will age well. For a tea to age well it has also got to be correctly/well processed. And that's even before we talk about blending. The old Haoji chas , were mainly single region tea because in those days the artisans produced tea within the vicinity of their own villages. Transporting raw materials would have been a real pain , if not quite impossible on a daily basis in those days. So the old teas like song pin or Fook yuen cheong were single mountain Yiwu and kheng cheong hao from another mountain.

Haoji teas were not single region, sorry. It's been long documented that early teas were blends of higher and lower elevation teas. They don't all come from the same village the way teas do now. You can read 19th century visitors to Yunnan talking about how when they make puerh the different kinds of leaves are mixed together and the practice of "撒面" was also common.