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! 🐎