How to guarantee puerh tea is authentic

[bagua7]

I just read this statement online:

"Authentic Pu-erh teas can only be made from Yunnan’s famous broad leaf arbor tea tree varietals. The highest quality of authentic Pu-erh Teas are made with tealeaves that are hand-harvested from wild and semi-wild antique tea trees (+100 years and older)."

How does a vendor guarantee me that the bing I am purchasing sticks to that statement and the tea hasn't been cultivated from multiple trees and from different areas.

My main concern with this regard is fluoride poisoning due to the consumption of rubbish tea.

Is quality reflected in the price, or not necessarily since markups are common especially with Chinese products. So what you actually think is quality due to the high price involved it could be really junk.

Cheers.

[wyardley]

How does a vendor guarantee me that the bing I am purchasing sticks to that statement and the tea hasn't been cultivated from multiple trees and from different areas.

There is no guarantee (or, more to the point, plenty of people may be willing to give you a guarantee, but be leery of these people). Even if your vendor tells you something in good faith, unless s/he has personally followed the tea through every step of the process without letting it out of sight, it's hard to ever be 100% sure.

Personally, I think the best approach is to learn (over time) to trust your 5 senses. You may drink some unpleasant teas, and you'll end up ingesting some pesticides, etc., but I wouldn't lose a lot of sleep over it. There are some signs that a tea may be good quality and that it may be from old and / or semi-wild plants, but it takes time to learn to recognize them. I think one of the most important things is to begin to trust how the tea makes your body feel, and whether you enjoy drinking it or not.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the tea coming from multiple areas, unless it's being sold as single region / single village tea. A lot of great puers are blended, and blended tea could still be composed of all, or primarily, old tree material. Many of the good material may come in small quantities, and villagers often pool their raw material. In some cases, you might be able to make some educated guesses from looking at the spent leaves, but again, I wouldn't spend a lot of time worrying about it, unless you're paying top buck for "Lao Banzhang" and are worried you're not getting it (you're probably not).

Is there a reason you're specifically worried about flourine poisoning? This is mostly a concern with specific types of brick teas, and you'd have to consume really huge quantities before it would become a problem. My understanding is that this is mostly a problem in areas with very high consumption of certain types of brick tea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_brick#Health_effects

I know some folks who drink extremely large amounts of puer tea, and I've never heard of any of them coming down with flourosis.

Anyway, all that said, of course there are tea producers who have a good reputation for picking good quality material, and overseeing its production. I encourage you to spend some time reading what people have to say about these producers.

As in many things with tea... you are probably not going to get the best quality tea for a low price, but if you pay a high price, you are not necessarily going to get the best tea.

[TomVerlain]

........."Authentic Pu-erh teas can only be made from Yunnan’s famous broad leaf arbor tea tree varietals. The highest quality of authentic Pu-erh Teas are made with tealeaves that are hand-harvested from wild and semi-wild antique tea trees (+100 years and older).".....................

That statement is wrong ...

Pu-erh is be made from Camellia Sinensis, which is not neccessarily "arbor" trees, and which can be found in multiple areas.

I am pretty sure some of the classic cakes like Song Pin or a 50's red mark, or the "88" cake were not from "wild and semi-wild antique trees". Age and fortune have more to do with their legendary status than "semi-antique" trees

There are pictures of very well done fakes of tea on this board, as well as stories of vendors who make fantastic claims, so navigating through the crap to gold is a difficult task. One needs to be a bit like luke, and as Obi Wan says, "use the Force"

[alan logan]

Pu-erh is be made from Camellia Sinensis, which is not neccessarily "arbor" trees, and which can be found in multiple areas.

many more species are involved in Yunnan. camellia sinensis does not rule. I think something has been posted already here, and also on http://community.livejournal.com/puerh_tea/, sorry but I cant find on which page. I may have a pdf of a publication (that was posted on pu er tea community if I remember well), I will look for it and can transmit it to you asa I find it and if you are interested in it.

(generally, whatever the region, the "camellia sinensis" classification may be a bit rough, there is a diversity that this classification fails to consider -imho.)

As for old old cakes... well in those times I guess no one had to wonder, at least not to the extent we do now. I would think it very likely that vast majority of cakes were made from old tree material because the market was not structured in a way that encouraged otherwise.

edit
just found the page on pu er tea community:
http://community.livejournal.com/puerh_tea/249074.html
the PDF was first accessible from google but then not anymore, I am very sure I downloaded it so I am going to look for it.

[apache]

......... There are pictures of very well done fakes of tea on this board, as well as stories of vendors who make fantastic claims, so navigating through the crap to gold is a difficult task. One needs to be a bit like luke, and as Obi Wan says, "use the Force"

"Seek advice you must! And to make oneself become a puerh master it takes years of tea tasting training. Yes, hmmm." said Yoda.

[bagua7]

Thanks for your insight on the matter, fellow puerh travellers

I am still a newbie, I know it takes time to recognise good from bad, but I am eager to learn.

Alan, I would really appreciate if you could upload that pdf file (if you end up finding it).

Cheers.

[TomVerlain]

I have some 1970's vietnamese "border" tea, which is not pu'erh by defenition. However, it is certainly pu'erh-like enough for me. Same for Liu An or Liu Bao. It is the end result that is good, not neccessarily the marketing. You could take two identical cakes and store one one way, the other the other way, and get wildly different results. Though they would both be "authentic", perhaps only one would be drinkable.

[alan logan]

Alan, I would really appreciate if you could upload that pdf file (if you end up finding it).

yes, got my hands on it!
I don't think it is possible to attach a doc in a thread, but i can send you the pdf (sending you a PM).

I can not reproduce here the whole content, but it is ok to quote, so here is, as a quote, a list of wild tea species featured in this publication :

(Table 2. Species and distribution of wild tea ( Sect. Thea, Camellia)

- C. costata China: SE Guizhou, NW Guangdong, N and E Guangxi 700 – 1100, evergreen broadleaf forest

- C. crassicolumna :
var. crassicolumna China: SE Yunnan 1300 – 2300, evergreen broadleaf forest
var. multiplex China: SE Yunnan 1900 – 2210, evergreen broadleaf forest
var. shangbaensis China: S Yunnan 2450, evergreen broadleaf forest

- C. fangchengensis China: S Guangxi 320, evergreen broadleaf forest

- C. grandibracteata China: W Yunnan 1750 – 1850, evergreen broadleaf forest

- C. gymnogyma
var. gymnogyma China: SE Yunnan, SW Guangxi, S Guizhou 1000 – 1600, broadleaf forest or scrub
var. remotiserrata China: NE Yunnan, N Guizhou, S Sichuan 920 – 1350, china fir forest or broadleaf forest

- C. kwangsiensis
var. kwangnanensis China: SE Yunnan 1550 – 1850, broadleaf forest
var. kwangsiensis China: SE Yunnan, W Guangxi 1500 – 1900, broadleaf forest

- C. leptophylla China: S Guangxi 220 – 850, scrub

- C. petilophylla China: Guangdong, S Hunan 270 – 480, sparse forest or scrub

- C. purpurea China: SE Yunnan 1500 – 2200, evergreen broadleaf forest

- C. sinensis
var. assamica China: Yunnan, Guizhou, Gaungxi, Hainan; Vietnam; 100 – 1500, evergreen broadleaf forest
Laos; Thailand; Myanmar; NE India
var. dehungensis China: S Yunnan, SW Yunnan 1000 – 1600, under forest or scrub
var. pubilimba China: SE Yunnan, Guangxi, W Guangdong, Hainan 240 – 1450, broadleaf forest
var. sinensis China: S China, SE Tibet; S Japan; N Myanmar 130 – 200, sparse forest or scrub

- C. tachangensis China: E Yunnan, SW Guizhou, W Guangxi 1500 – 2250, evergreen broadleaf forest

- C. taliensis China: W Yunnan 1300 – 2700, sparse forest / scrub

please note that the publication suggests that "Only one species and one variety of wild tea are domesticated and used for
commercial tea production", ie var sinensis. which does not mean that no other varietals are used, but that they are used in their wild form only. And also that the whole publication is about biodiversity in Yunnan, not only about tea.

I think this list was also quoted on pu er tea community.

if you google w key words including "yunnan, tea, species, wild, diversity, cultivars..." or w the name of a species as keyword, you will stumble upon publications, some of them are not accessible (only abstract) but others are.

[apache]

Here is some more taxanomic information about the genus of Camellia:
Camellia
This probably is the most complete and accurate species list regarding to tea. Notice that there are three infraspecies (subspecies) of Camellia sinensis and one of them is puerh tea.

For those of you who are interested in how plant names are organised here is my little note on this.
The system used in science is called "binomial nomenclature" started by Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), a Swedish botanist and zoologist.
The naming scheme is:
genus, species epithet, (origianl author, the person first describe the species), new author, infraspecies marker (e.g. var.), infraspecies name, (original infraspecies author), new infraspecies author

Phew, hope I don't miss anything. Where you see an author with "L.", it is Linnaeus abbreviation.

In the list you would come across the term "synonym", it means the taxon to which the synomic name referring is already described by an accepted name.


I hope no one going to ask me to give a definition of "species"!

[alan logan]

very interesting!
thanks

edit:
among links I had collected I found those, which really do not add much to what apache has posted, but anyway:

http://www.efloras.org/florataxon.aspx? ... n_id=10882
this one is about theaceae, to which camellia belong. you can dowmload the pdf (scroll down). on the site you can find pictures of many plants described.

http://www.efloras.org/florataxon.aspx? ... _id=105380
this one is more specifically about camellia (not all camellia is suitable to make tea, you all know that). same as for other page, you can download a pdf, and find pics on the site.

[gingkoseto]

Before knowing how to recognize what's authentic puerh, it's more important to know how to find one's own taste preference and follow one's own taste.

I think puerh is a very strange field of tea. Through years reading and talking to experts, what I feel so far is, experts don't agree with each other on many things of puerh - and I am talking about the real experts in tea industries, tea science departments of universities and with reputable tea vendors. Such discrepancies are not as commonly seen in other fields of tea. "Mainstream ideas" change from region to region, and from decade to decade. Many things that are seemingly for sure, are actually not for sure.

Of course I still hope to read and talk to more experts, learn from them, and learn from comparing their theories. But meantime, it's always easier and more convenient to taste more and find I like. Why should I care about what's the "right" tea to drink anyway, if I know what I like

Inspired by this thread, today I am going to revisit a tea I like very much - a tuo manufactured by CNNP with leaves they obtained from Myanma. By the current official definition of puerh (National Standards GB/T22111-2008), this tea is 100% unauthentic puerh

[bearsbearsbears]

"Mainstream ideas" change from region to region, and from decade to decade. Many things that are seemingly for sure, are actually not for sure.

This! +1

As with all teas (and all things?), it's good to keep an open mind, consider the source of the information as much as the information itself, and revisit one's thoughts and beliefs accordingly.

[tenuki]

You can't drink 'authentic'.

[shah82]

With shupu, you most certainly *can*.

[alan logan]

that statement you have read is not "wrong" but as such it is not completely right either because it would be difficult to sum things up in just one sentence.

ginkoseto wrote 2 interesting posts you will certainly find helpful:
http://gingkobay.blogspot.com/2010/05/w ... erh-1.html
http://gingkobay.blogspot.com/2010/06/w ... bates.html