The Raw and the Cooked: 2017 Puerh Predictions

Last year I enjoyed writing an article about puerh season predictions. Some of them came true. So this year I assembled a few more, just for the fun of speculating off the top of my head. After all, my tea hobby is mostly speculation, brewing and stewing anyway. 

2017 is a Rooster.

The other word doesn’t work in English without tittering unless you want to use the word beenghole or Bacon Log in the same sentence. We are barely a month out of Chinese New Year and the jokes are old already. I am loving 2018 Dog right about now.

The Trees are one year older.

This means adding 100 years in retail marketing. With evidence too, so we expect more photos of trees full of leaves no one is allowed to pick, and plenty of grandmas willing to swear on their betel leaf that those trees were around before the flood. Likewise, I am fairly certain my Dear Son will happily testify under oath that my tea collection is ten years older than it really is. He can probably find a Tea Sommelier to certify stamp a piece of paper for him for $50 or less, a small fee to pay to add thousands of dollars to the worth of my collection. Business is booming all around the tea industry, and I haven’t a thing to wear.

The Tea Harvest will Happen.

Yes, the forecast is optimistic we will have new tea this year.

The Great Shrinking gets dodgier.

Last year we started seeing more and more 100g and even smaller beengcha, with better material than in the past. I continue to see these small cakes as dodgy buys at best. While this small cake might be an opportunity to taste a higher quality of tea in a very few cases (and I mean few), it’s not a good size for future hoarding. To clarify, I’m not here to represent the sensible buyer and most readers of this blog know that by now.

We want as much good tea as possible. I see the 100g and smaller cake size as a trial size for people who are new to puerh and don’t know what they are getting into. Otherwise, why would I want a cake of maybe 12 sessions? If the tea is good, then I regret the small size and want more. A good eighth will flake off a cake in normal conditions anyway, especially when the wrapper gives out which we all know it will. If I want a sample, I will order a sample and it arrives in a bag.

Also, small cakes are clutter in the storage. Forget your nice stacks of 357s, the small ones fall all over in a messy way. I feel like buying a reliable 357g every year such as a good old boring Menghai is a better move in the long run than futzing with tiny cakes until you grow weary, and drink them up quickly just to be done with the tediousness of caring for that small size. Keep in mind tea vendors are thinking about selling tea, and this is why they make these small sizes. We buyers are storing, and for storage and long term relationships with our tea cakes, the bigger size wins for my investment.

Somebody will invent the Pumidor.

Old fridges and unplugged wine coolers are reaching a social peak, and yet anxiety abounds amongst tea heads huddled over hygrometers showing >1 SD variability in humidity levels. This situation is ripe for the next huckster to crowd fund the perfect puerh storage cabinet to bilk worried collectors out of the price of a premium tong. Barring that, we have an opening in the western puerh market for Florida homesteaders to rent a warehouse and start charging for long distance storage. This could unleash yet more market opportunities for things like chartered flights to visit their Pu and blocks of hotel rooms serving continental breakfast boba. I can’t wait.

Someone else will discover Bug Shit tea.

Yet another blog post waiting to happen and you know it’s inevitable. Funny how we never seem to see consistent reviews year after year by the same blogger of this season’s new BS tea, with nuances in flavor and such.

The term Boutique will lose all meaning.

So, what exactly is “boutique” nowadays? Does Chen Yuan Hao qualify as boutique? After all, it is a brand sourced by a single entity. For some, “boutique” means northern tea, or what gets called “oolong” tea which presumes that tea cakes made by small entities won’t age, even though none of the so-called “boutiques” have existed even ten years at this point. To others, “boutique” refers to (mostly) white people traveling to Yunnan to make tea cakes. Oddly too many of those making such a proclamation about aging have not even tried the teas fresh or aged.

I don’t know about you, but I see small buyers/producers of puerh tea coming and going from the retail scene, maybe more coming in than going out. But not enough time has elapsed anywhere to determine which teas will age into anything good. We are talking 10-20 years here, and that presumes such tea will even survive the storage years, either getting wrecked or drunk up by the owner well before any Judgment Day arrives. As for wrecking in storage, at this point I know several people storing tea longer than five years in the west, people who own both “boutique” and factory teas and I will bet money their tea survives quite nicely. I am not counting myself in that handful of people either. I plan to drink up or wreck mine. Anything left will be placed next to my urn in an unmarked location.

Despite all that, Social Media will break into all-out war over Factory vs. Boutique.

More than a few grumblings and rumblings are poking themselves into my blog comment section lately, and louder still around the forums. Right now, Factory is winning. I don’t know if factory tea is really and truly better or if this reflects a desire for aged tea, and we just don’t have any aged house tea from small boutique producers. I was surprised last year at a tea tasting when alongside some truly fine new teas, the group vote overwhelmingly chose an aged factory tea as the best one served that day. I do not know if this was simply a preference for aged tea over fresh. But the new teas were far and away super premium leaf, unspoiled by poor processing and yet most folks wanted the grungy old cake that had no real depth of character except for the fact that it was fifteen years old.

So in lacking other aged alternatives people buy older factory teas, paying huge mortgage-sized sums in a few cases, putting up with very wet storage and retired smoke. On some level, the flavors in older factory teas are what people are accustomed to. On the other hand, some older teas do pack a punch and I respect the stomach enough to know that aged teas are better to drink. I hope that we don’t always need to settle for dusty old brick simply because it’s aged, or pay out the child’s college fund merely to drink decent aged tea.

I also hope that as people get more heated in debates over tea preferences, we remember to respect the drink of our fellow men and women. In the remains of a long day we all need our tea, and punching someone’s enjoyment steals peace from the tea table. Disrupting the tea table is the bigger faux pas, and a huge rudeness in the end. The reality is in a moment of thirst we all will gladly drink that dusty old brick if it’s the only thing we have rather than a jasmine oolong, though I suspect many of us might quaff the oolong too. After all nobody is going back to coffee.

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To wit, the “Taobao Tea Melee.”

Tea heads are not the only ones duking it out. I rejoiced to see this headline in translation on puer.cn. I envision Taobao store owners engaging in hand to hand combat with girls in candy colored swimsuits walking around with numbered placards for each round, and clowns flinging puerh discs like Frisbees to eager outstretched hands. It’s about time puerh tea gets more fun because really the whole scene is far too serious.

Actually, the article is referring to the quick buck made by Taobao sellers of fake old tea, mostly “wet warehouse” designed to jump-age the tea artificially. The author points out that people are fooled once, maybe twice, but eventually customers catch on to the game. He advocates for “small profit” tea selling of the genuine brand. I like that, but it’s a pipe dream. What I really glean from these articles and around the net is a continuing down trend of highly wet stored tea in the consumer palate. A bit of humidity is good for buyers in the west, but more than 3-5 years humid storage is a risky buy, whether on Taobao or anywhere else. Stick to dry unless you are certain you like overcooked tea.

Yunnan Sourcing will make a Jinggu cake.

In a tea world of such contention and climate change, some things in the puerh tea world are reassuringly reliable. As my post here goes to press, Yunnan Sourcing has announced they will be rolling out a new website format in the next few weeks. Apparently the old site is straining under an antiquated architecture. I glanced at the new site, and the look is quite different. I am sure the new site will be serviceable, but I will miss the reassuring feeling of tea shopping with the gold and red colors of the old site. I want to thank Scott Wilson for giving us so many wonderful years with the former site, and I look forward to testing the new one.

Well, now you have my predictions. Do you have any predictions for this year?