The Myth of Truly Great Puerh Tea

Crock of Treachery

Recently I lost Mr. B and you know from reading here that in dealing with the loss of a friend, I chose a very expensive and rather nice tea to share that experience with me. I am still writing up the last chapter of Treachery, but it's so painful and even merely re-reading for editing just is too much this week. And maybe nobody wants to read it anyway. My brain circles the edges of the burned and boxed-up loss just like my pick chips off tea leaves trying to get to the center of it all, and when I get there...what? The beenghole is a nubbin of tea so compressed that, if I manage to break it apart, I am left with just dust and bits of tea bone. Generally speaking we are disappointed to receive the beenghole when buying an expensive sample, and we consider beenghole sessions the least refined example of how the tea brews and tastes. I must ask myself, is puerh tea really a worthy and refined experience, and if so, what tea is the best? Ok, let's pick the outside edges and get to that beenghole.

First of all, why did I reach for the tea at all? Did it really do anything for me in moments of loss? As a drug of choice, not much. Along with it, I also got benzos, pot caramels, cherry Leinies, As Ever rose' (🥹), opioids, diphenhydramine, 新ルルAゴールド (clemastine fumerate with belladonna which is so damn difficult to get anymore), Ambien someone mailed me, and someone else gave me powdered mushrooms. On a scale of effectiveness, any of these things beat puerh tea for lying down and passing out. Maybe a funeral is not the best time for something subtle when all you want is a sledgehammer to the head? 

Which raises a notion of whether puerh tea is an experience best saved for moments of calm reflection. But is this truly so? I can reach for a grungier tea, and a case exists for why a dry-stored Menghai (or wet-stored for that matter) is a fine choice to swallow my pain. But, I feel like I am simply rummaging if I am seriously digging through choices like shou, liu bao or bad factory sheng. So when my emotional stomach is already upset, do I really want to drink the wine vinegar or reach for the cognac? Honestly cognac is arguably a better choice than anything here. Therefore the best I can say about a fine puerh tea is that such things are better reserved for a more refined moment, to reflect on its best qualities, yada yada. What this idea suggests is that we place puerh tea in its own silo of experience. Well, logically-speaking, every aesthetic experience is a silo by the ouroboros nature of relativity to itself (see my Flip Flops and a Rock on that one). 

Finally we are dancing around the beenghole of the real issue. If I truly conclude that puerh tea is an aesthetic experience best reserved for a particular moment, what is a fine puerh tea really worth? If something like Ambien or a pot gummy is more effective, then why get into ANYTHING that costs thousands of dollars when the other happy stuff costs maybe $35 for a week's worth? Or, for that matter, why not do the Brit thing and toss a bag in a mug. 

So, I am begging the scary question of how overpriced puerh tea is compared to what the experience truly gives, in the end. The beenghole itself reveals how much of a sucker you were to buy that tea. 

Let's face it. This whole puerh tea market outside of Yunnan formed itself around one man who stored a single tea so well that we have a contained market bubble around a mostly legendary myth. (Now, I know some of you have actually tried the '88 Qing Bing, and the rest of us with a piece of the true cross line up for miles behind you). I personally don't think Cloud nor anyone else inflated the fine qualities of the well-stored (dry, by the way) '88 Qing Bing. But the value of the entire market of puerh tea since the Qing Bing rests on the myth of old leaf + processing + well-stored = Miracle.

I think the price is too high. Even the best tea, and I am someone who has been able to pay. Sure, everyone says the price is too high and we agree will still go higher. We can argue scarcity and I suggest we can even argue the subtle merits of the best tea, but in a life where other teas are far more pleasant and effective at delivering floral theanine, and other substances soothe the nerves without any debate, puerh tea is a sucky overpriced life choice at any stage of reality. Puerh is a pantry item, one of my choices along with dry mustard and Sweet Baby Rays. If you tie me down, I'll probably ask you to leave me the Sweet Baby Rays. Well, now I am just kidding, but you get the idea when taking it all the way to the end. The factory bros probably win points in not wasting so much money on a tea experience that is self-limiting in aesthetics and not really all that scarce. 

However, I am also questioning the aesthetic value of every puerh tea including the Qing Bing. The Qing Bing is Myth beyond myth now, because 20-30 years later nobody has managed to store up another one as good, not even using the best leaf possible. Is not this truly curious, that teas show up every week with fine leaf and storage and yet nobody makes a Qing Bing comparison? I really doubt anything out of Taetea, white2tea, CYH, XZH, pick your place yet none of them reach so far, and any of these produce about the same experience in the end. And even early 2000s tea is not so vastly different from the Qing Bing leaf, but still no other tea reaches a comparison point. Doesn't this suggest criteria so loose nobody can possibly reach it? Myth. 

No real puerh lover is giving up their tea, nor questioning their buying or drinking judgement over any of these questions. But my point is, puerh itself will never break the Qing Bing myth. No, it will be life or death or maybe just autumn itself that tosses tea out the value window in favor of the truly medicinal when faced with a lonely winter. In the end, life itself, like a real estate crash, or food scarcity, will quickly make a dried cob of corn more expensive and more desireable than tea. Short of this, we remain convinced the Qing Bings are a miracle worth attaining when life still feels good, and I don't see how that bubble ever bursts. Not even for me.

Pantry Considerations and Puerh Tea Collecting

I don't like the word collecting. For one, collecting puerh tea has a whole subculture of people looking to buy teas which appreciate in value over time, and the purchases are quite deliberately chosen toward that goal. Puerh banking instead of a savings account and/or blogging for pennies of accumulated interest. We have access to so much puerh tea nowadays, and factories geared to large productions of fairly stable and repetitive recipes gutted the value of puerh tea collected over time. No new puerh teas exist nowadays priced for any type of value collecting. Collector value is one part production buzz year, and one part you saved something that no one else has, and that tea miraculously doesn't smell like your sock drawer, or maybe it does but people like the taste of your socks.

I feel rewarded by my tea in the context of building or having built up a home pantry. A home pantry is the comfy, slow living side of life. In my family I grew up watching and enjoying food preservation, canning and fermentation. Sometimes in the evening I opened the laundry room cupboards of my dad's house to look at the jars of Canadian salmon, pickled cucumbers, homegrown horseradish, vats of molding sauerkraut, and pickled hot peppers. We had a specially dedicated refrigerator for TUBS of pickled fish (2 gallon buckets with lids). Here we had finger-sized fish filets, small fish like crappies, and also Lake Superior white fish brining away with onions, large peppercorns, cloves, cardemom and allspice berries (Jamaica berry). We had 1 gallon buckets of aged parmesan that smelled like vomit and the smell knocked me back when dad opened them up. Today I long for parmesan that smells like anything at all.

The last of a jar of dahongpao
that was super smoky but after 10
years is plummy perfection.

My mother knew how to can food, but she was a city girl and not really interested in home-making. So, I learned about well-stocked food pantries as an extension of my father. His husbandry included all forms of planting, hunting and gathering. The difference between my parents is my father grew up starving and never could let a spring go by without planting something. He never went to a grocery store for things like meat or milk, he acquired these locally from farms. I cannot ever recall a moment of seeing my father at a grocery except to buy beer and nightcrawlers.

Next we have the dry side of a pantry which consists of spices, tea, and various items you buy once in a decade or more. I have things that my parents did not and are only possible to acquire in recent generations. I age my own miso, for example. I have dried peppers from New Mexico. My mushrooms are dried shitaakes and dried morels, although my father took us morel hunting and they are native to my area forests. I buy homemade cucumber kimchi and let it liquify to a burning sludge, a spoonful of the liquid soothes that pinched tummy spot from GLP-1 shots I take for the diabetes I got from mom. Recently I discovered the joy of liquified chipotle pepper stored for 5+ years. I started collecting bitters with the idea of crafting beverages with my own sparkling tonic water. I have a bucket of intense cocoa powder that is impossible to find now. My sister taught me cooking with preserved lemons. 

I married a copy of my mom rather than my father.

"You have no room in the fridge," Mr. Guangzhou stated after his nightmare return from China where everything is better than here. "You have stuff in there that looks like 20 years old and needs throwing out."

"Don't you touch my miso!" 

He doesn't know anything about a pantry. His life is 100% eating out, and I get it, that in countries and cities where someone on the street cooks better than almost anyone else can, eating out is tastier and economical. But it's not me, and not rural, like here where we live. 

Not everyone took the opportunity
to put their tea tits into a personalized
Yiwu beeng from Bitterleaf.

I watch Mr. G. run out to look for things I actually already have. What is he gonna do when the supply side fails? Because it always does. I can't get cocoa so good as what I have, not at a price I can afford. Thirty years ago I got those 4 lbs for $20, a special order from the food co-op I belonged to, a special order for someone who failed to pick it up and a worker I know offered it to me cheap. Never in a million years will that happen again! Herodotus said thousands of years ago that riches don't remain in one place for long! 

Puerh tea also ends up a special collection of opportunistic buys that I can never repeat. I can lament I didn't buy more, but maybe I couldn't afford more, or didn't think a tea particularly nice, or I added it on a shipping threshold. But, like the cocoa, I got a one-time happy find that won't return, won't come round again. 

One aspect of my tea pantry that makes me happy is the sheer variety of teas and herbs. My son likes a cup of puerh now and then, but mostly I am the person enjoying puerh. When people here want tea, they are looking for whatever they drank before and consider tea. 

People are easy to pick tea for. You can spot their level with a few quick questions, the first is "what is your favorite country for tea?" If they say India or England, you know you are probably dealing with a tea bagger and can serve accordingly. Why waste anything good on them, puerh won't meet their expectations and even some decent loose leaf will get them feeling defensive. The only answer is China or maybe Taiwan, and then I can probe more to learn what teas they have had before. Japan, ok but dodgy if they say matcha and can't tell me where they order it online, or it turns out they order at a drive thru.

Truth is, I probably have something in my cupboard for literally anyone. I have my puerh teas, but also all kinds of hand-processed beautiful teas, rolled oolong of course, aged shui xians, spindly long-leaf reds, powdered bug poop, bamboo-stuffed shou, wrapped liu bao. I have jars and pots of things I forgot to label, mystery teas that are a joy to discover all over again. To be honest, the tongs hold up the sofa and sometimes the big crock is too much trouble to dig through. I am glad now I ditched the plastic everything except the plastic bags I need a solution for. Aesthetics, but maybe more healthy? I am even discovering that sample baggies I normally won't open for myself are a godsend when someone comes by and their answer to my "what" tea question includes a grocery store. 

homemade batch shou puerh

Got icky belly, I have mint herbs, menstrual herbs and the teas to drink instead of coffee. But I also bought a Rocco drinks fridge for some of the sparkling herb beverages and vitamin beverages my son likes. I put in my wormwood German absinthe bottles. I usually have a couple choices of coffee and of course my top shelf cocoa if someone starts bragging on hot chocolate. You can laugh, but I bought three bottles of As Ever rose' from the Duchess of Sussex who reminds me of my self-obsessed mother. It's very sour-tasting, but admittedly I know almost nothing about wines. 

The point is, the joy of homemaking and/or husbandry is providing my family with flavors and tastes that bring joy and good health. To discover with surprise that the tea that I bought on a whim turns into a favorite, or soothes the hurt feelings, the high gas prices, the worries, the wars, bad sex, no sex, the death of a loved one, and deadly bugs out to kill us. I can put you in a coma and do what I like with your corpus. 

A well-stocked pantry is a haven in an unstable world. The whole point of hunting and gathering is never to feel that hunger or thirst and come up empty. Learning the gratitude that comes of any bounty, of any stability and good health we can create and maybe pass on the good along with the bad. I may not have laying hens, but when eggs go up in price like they did, or my cat needs expensive x-rays, then I have things to trade. 

Not necessary, but nice!

I am glad to have teas that are aged, mid aged and teas I want to keep forever young. For me, essential dark teas include large factory, but also small batch boutiques. I think brick teas are a must. So are aged factory teas, and I think 10-year+ aged shou is a safe bet for anyone on a few meds. Liu bao is nice for a followup to steak or a pork stir fry. Green teas are cooling on a hot day. Teas made into little cubes or balls are handy to toss in a tea pot before sitting down to write. I have roots and things for female troubles, or puerhs to bring on nice sexy dreams. Aged whites for people who don't like much caffeine. Smoky tuos go well with a bland baked tilapia. Spent lapsang leaves make a rub for pork butt and chicken legs. 

Whatever tea you have forms the pantry for when life and death hit me hard as they have. In a world that seems so unstable, apart from a flood I feel a little more confident that I have everything I need and riches beyond that. I am grateful to the tea friends who helped me along the way with a heads up at key moments when a one-time deal came by. I hope you dear readers enjoy your pantry as much as I enjoy mine.

Cwynnnnn

2016 Treachery of Storytelling vol 2, 2026, Mr B.

"Are you on drugs?" the probation officer asked Mr. B. 

Yes, it's the Treachery time of year again, and we start out with our hero already under law enforcement supervision.

"That P.O. has full-sleeve tats and a nose ring," Mr. B said on the phone afterward. "She's asking about anger classes."

"They are just trying to figure you out," I said. "See what slot you fit in, because you don't fit in one." 

"A full sleeve! How much did all that cost?"

He didn't think someone with ink shop tattoos had the right to even ask about the three blurred and pen-scratched-in-the-1960's blue tattoos he sported. 

And so the summer started early and badly for Mr B., still living in the junkyard in summer, wintering with a friend for 3 years now. Recently, the land owner David found him a potential roommate situation, but that went nowhere.

"The guy had the spare bedroom full of junk!" said B. "He expected me to sleep on the sofa, while paying him full rent!" 

"Maybe you should have taken it. Offer the guy to help clean up that spare room, work on the situation," I said. 

Even with too many evictions and a long court record of petty disorderlies, B. thinks the low-rent grass is greener elsewhere. He thinks he has choices. 

What choices do any of us have? 

And why is my cup cloudy? This tea wasn't cloudy last year. 

No, it is only dried minerals in the cup from tap water. I forgot to rinse everything clean.

Bought B. a wood stove so he might stay in his trailer over the winter. But it needed a longer flue. I offered to pick up the parts on Amazon, only then I hit a treachery of my own. 

"I'm not going to have my car driven out there to help that man," my-formerly-of-Guangzhou ex said, when I chatted about the stove back at home. "Mr. B. sent me a card saying guns don't kill people, people kill people." 

"On the back it said 'get your tickets for Wynonna.'"

"He was threatening to kill me."

Yeah...so the treachery is my ex is now living in my house, and claims back the car I have been driving for the nearly 10 years he was in China. 

Mr Guangzhou also ran off David the junkyard owner stopping by to talk about Mr. B.

"I told that guy David to get lost and never come back."

"You don't know anything," I said. "These are my friends!" 

By now my cataracts meant it wasn't worth me buying another car. But, David hasn't trusted me since.

The ex walked all that back about not letting me drive the car, after seeing how upset I was. But knowing his views, I tried to save driving out to the junkyard, going only for when I had some actual business, like something to bring, or maybe if Mr. B. needed a ride to the courthouse. In fact, earlier in the spring Mr B said "nah don't come out, I'm just reading books until the weather warms up." Similarly he discouraged Ron from Mpls from visiting. 

Bottom line, I haven't seen Mr. B since October 2025. 

On that October day, we were going to finish up his rent rebate paperwork from two years ago. I drove out with some Taco Bell and cherry-flavored Leinies, and we sat in the car eating everything, facing the golden sun in the windshield. We had one big thing in common. When you drive for a living and you like it, then you always feel better sitting in the car just talking, than sitting anywhere else. We always felt better going for a drive, with a $2 bean burrito, and just watching people go by from the windshield. In the world, but not of it. If you don't already know, it's also what black sheep do, when your family doesn't love you. Outside the car, rejection is right around the corner. 

Speaking of that, rejection is how he took it when Ron said a friend from Cali would visit in April, and Mr. B's visit must end. Mr. B. therefore left in a huff in March. 

"He took my new sweater!" Ron said. Mr. B hadn't, he wasn't a clothes fiend. But the accusation hurt.

"Ron needs to clean out his closet, it's probably off a hanger on the floor," said B. Rejections rejected.

But in April, Mr. B. started complaining of sneezing and trouble breathing. Seemed like allergies. 

"It's a hantavirus," Mr. B. said. "I'm pretty sure there are mouse nests in the fans in the Toyota. I breathed that in driving to Ron's in December." 

"Well, go to the doctor."

"I can't, my Medicare card dissolved in my wallet. It's made of paper! It should be made of plastic!" 

"You are on Medicaid, they can look you up at the clinic."

The monthly visits with tattoo lady at the county got more stressful. 

"She's threatening to do a home inspection," said Mr. B. 

Readers here have seen the photos over the years of what that might look like.

The problem with treachery isn't the Big Rejection everyone is afraid of, that mostly doesn't happen more than once or twice to most people. No, it's the small treacheries that add up. The car you can't borrow, the friend who asks you to leave early, the flat tire, the Medicare card made of paper,  the stove that doesn't work, the illness that never goes away, summer heat that never cools, winter cold that never warms, lots of alcohol and parasitic veggies. 

Mr. B called me up July 29, elated.

"I think I passed the psych eval the tattoo lady ordered." 

Thinking he probably hadn't, I wondered what program they might try and slap him in next.

"What did you say to them?" I asked.

"Guy asked me about my childhood. Like did I skip school, etc." he said. "They knew I'd been in juvie, how did he know that? So, I said, I'm 75 years old! This was in the 1960s, what does all that matter now?"

"The burden is definitely on them to show it matters."

"Exactly. I haven't been in the system for 20 years." 

"Hey, you showed up for yourself. At a psych eval. Hell yeah."...that's a little win in a big LOSE. But still, a life-level-up win...clutch.

Although we did prompt him to lay off the beer ahead of time since he was revving up more every day.

"Tattoo lady says if I pass then she will ask the judge if I can drink beer. They didn't bust me for drinking."

"Sounds like you been presuming..." yeah he was back on the beer.

Phone beeped on Aug 9.

"Hey, it's David. Mr B's passed away. He's at the funeral home in town. So you want to give me a call, all right bye."

Puer Me

Lately I detect a downer note in the puer chatter, well more than one. Everybody western is whining about something, the tea they have, the tea they don't have. What they paid too much for, whatever their collection consists of is all wrong and needs to be something else. Some whines are worthy, like needing to buy tea aged in a restaurant basement and help translating the menu. Others, like "my climate is bad" is just negativity debby and needs to stop. You need to stop it. The good news is, the Tong People won the green tea phenom with our peculiar tea world still mostly intact. Who would have thunk it? We got through everything green tea healthy without flooding our market and raising prices, and adding obscene competition. 

There are two big reasons behind our victory, one real and another, delusional. But neither will go away anytime soon. The "Real" is the mass adoption of GLP-1 medications for weight loss, a scientific breakthrough, resulting in very real weight-loss that killed off the need to drink copious amounts of green tea. 

In truth, we sorta saw this coming. GLP drugs or some other medical solution to counteract mass market food, or whatever genetic inheritance we have to gain weight by eating nothing. Once a serious solution to weight loss emerged from medicine, then snake oils fall from the market like empty wasp nests. The direction for weight loss is back with medical professionals and I don't see that changing anytime soon unless the shots kill people. I can take the injection for diabeetus because any untoward death on my part cannot rule out pesticides going back to last mid-century. And I will swear by that on my tomb no matter what happens.

This is great news. Nobody is going to look to puer tea or any green tea to lower their A1-C. Already the tea section has shrunk big time at the grocery stores. 

Puer tea inherently makes itself difficult to love for the jet set with its bitter, fungal, rinse-the-dirt-first profile. I mean wtf. Watch out for too much mold. Make sure you pick out the corn kernels and pubic hair from your sample, and notice any stinging pesticides on the way down and out. Who is going to drink this stuff anymore? Nobody, thank the Maker. Zzzzt-click right in the backside, and run along, you, back to coffee where you belong. Another plus, that coffee rinses booze better. 

Okay, GLP-1 drugs are science, what about the other enduring reason We Win , the delusional one? The Delusion is that every person who "likes" tea thinks they are a friggin' expert on it. They will expound on their glorious teabag collection and not only feel no lack of information on good tea, they feel SATED. I have this delusion. Maybe anyone with tea will defend their choices. In fact, I know folks do. It amazes me how far people will go to prop up one another's tea mistakes. It's a double-down, triple-down. The fawning is incredible on cheap dirt, but who am I to say. Everyone an expert? In the subjective realm of taste, yes, everyone is. 

One small point of possible contention is that I think anyone with a puer tea collection is a tea expert. We can quibble over purchases, but really what you own gets down to this: you bought the best you could at the time, with what you had to spend. More importantly, you drank your way there. Nobody is born drinking a shou bottle, you probably went through diarrhea or ulcers to get where you are. If you are still drinking puer, then you learned a lot that nobody else in their right mind will try and repeat. 

I know everyone is sick of the diarrhea prose, but I want to slam the door and make sure the windows look bad so the hidden house of filthy, rinsable delights remains our itty bitty secret. The mass public is happy with its tea, feels no desire to change teas, and will attack you if you say anything to the contrary. Puer is still smexy, isn't it? Sort out your puer-me storage and toast one to all those the gods kicked off the tea bus. And cheer the eff up.

Narrow and Judgy Wins

Plastics Errs and Oops

You have seen this before.

Right, so let us see the tea writer starting off the new year on a wrong foot. I killed a tea. Not much tea, but still, some, and cannot be replaced. Like all the mistakes I regularly make, I try to learn something even if doomed to repeat. 

So what happened? We have had winter and -25C temperatures for several weeks now, and I ventured onto my unheated porch to find I left a tea out there since last summer. Nothing important, readers will recognize this last bit of 2012 CNNP Fuzhuan brick tea I bought from Jay in Hong Kong. This is what's left of the 1 kilo brick after taking a year to drink most of it in 2021. I stopped with a small piece left to serve as a reference for other teas in the future. Last summer we had a warm, humid season after two droughty summers when I didn't porch store my tea. So when we finally got a good tea fermenting summer, I set out only my Fu bricks and also Houde's drinker bricks just to acclimatize. I brought in my other teas, but overlooked this bit of brick sitting atop a file cabinet.

Adding a damp square
of paper towelling.

I keep dreaming of Fu Zhuan covered with crusty, zesty yellow flowers. But my tea shows how dry my climate really is outside of a few summer months. The bit of tea was stored in a loose plastic wrap. You can see how the erotium crystatum fungi is just little powdery bits now. After months and months untended on a now dry and freezing cold porch, the tea itself has more problems. I decided to try and revive it by adding a damp bit of toweling paper into a stainless steel container and put the whole thing in a warm place.

The flowers have sprouted back, which shows that the fungi survives in dry spore form and with dehydration and warmth will return. Fu brick is not strong like puerh tea, and once browned with age the broth is soothing rather than harsh. But this tea is just flat with hardly any flavor. 

Better?

I have seen bags of dried eurotium crystatum for sale on various websites. If I had a really humid climate, I could feel confident in ordering dried spores, knowing they revive easily. I could add them to my tea steeping, and probably with more flavorful results than trying to "grow" them. Kinda cool to know that. 

But now this tea is basically flavorless, so I can toss it or drink it. The life of the tea was 4 years in Hong Kong, and then 10 years with me. The tea initially was green, I think the fully browned tea here reflects a realistic purchase of tea which gets a good start in a humid place before importing it to store. 

Browned and brewed.

To store, as in, not on your porch during winter. 

Another thought that emerged from the incident was the plastic wrap I had around the tea. More and more articles are emerging with the dangers microplastics may have to our bodies over time. How do I feel about storing in plastic? 

Not sure I have a firm thought. First, one must honor our Yunnan (and elsewhere) tea producers who have stored tea wrapped mainly in bamboo and paper materials. These are ideal and most healthy materials for aging in warm, moist climates. But in cold, dry climates, we need other options. My solution has been the type of ceramic farm crocks that my family has used for generations to ferment cabbage. 

Plastic is a stabilizing material that can prevent interactions with the environment, and slow or altogether stop aging. Heating plastic is said to release more micro particles than cold plastic. Older vintage plastics apparently are more "shedded" than newer plastics. 

The written articles on microplastics are everywhere, but they aren't fully definitive. I myself have recommended wrapping in plastic to preserve tea that needs no further aging. Puerh teas are often sold in shrink wrap over the paper wrapper in part to keep them from absorbing scents in tea shops. Plastic wrap may be a strategy for online selling, to keep the tea looking as close to the photos as possible. Some tea writers prefer to store in plastic. 

I am still a little ambivalent on plastic. After all, I'm drinking a tea that might contain far worse chemicals, in some cases. Consensus seems to emerge on most things puerh, the small observations and mistakes still matter for everyone. I like to hear about these observations more than all the debates. I need some alternatives to plastic wrap. Tins are ok, but they are drying, and containers will still need controls with so much air. 

Happy New Year! 🐎