Wednesday 15 May 2013

So what exactly is Puer tea?

This is more for those interested in the tea detail, but hopefully also readable enough for anyone with a passing curiosity.

I've spent a week in Yunnan, been up four tea mountains, watched it being made, tasted many samples with a tea master, and I still don't fully understand Puer.
As someone who normally likes to have things clearly defined and contained, this should be frustrating, but in fact it's the opposite. It's fascinating, challenging, liberating - much more an art than a science, and to be appreciated in the same way.
So I can't define Puer, but I can describe what I've seen and tasted. It won't be definitive, and others will have different experiences and opinions.

I first need to explain that the Puer I have experienced on this trip is 'Shengcha". Sheng means raw, uncooked, or alive; cha means tea. Commonly called Raw Puer, in many ways the description 'alive tea' is more appropriate. I'll try to explain why below.

However, for most people outside China their experience of Puer is the cooked (or ripe) version. This is made by creating a large pile of raw Puer, wetting it, covering it and allowing it to ferment. The fermentation process takes around 45 days and converts the greyish-green Raw Puer into dark brown Cooked Puer. It is a skilful process, requiring the tea to be turned regularly to maintain even heat distribution. When the tea is ready, it is usually pressed into cakes, which are slowly dried in a warm room before wrapping in paper. The porous paper allows the cakes to mature, ideally in a cool dry store. A good Cooked Puer has a deep ruby red colour when infused and a rich flavour that starts off quite earthy but becomes sweeter as the tea matures. My first experience of cooked Puer was an inky black, turgid, musty horror, which I now recognise as a short-cut fake version produced for a western market unfamiliar with the real product. Things have moved on a bit since then.
Cooked Puer is produced on a large scale in factories whose names have become famous over the years. The largest and most famous is the Dayi factory in Menghai, whose processes and blend recipes are closely guarded secrets. The factory is closed to visitors. (An interesting aside is that Zhong Xin rents a house in the Dayi factory compound - he has no connection with the company, but conducts his own ripening and pressing experiments in the house).

So we return to Raw Puer. As far as I can tell, the key aspects are that the trees must be on one of the famous Yunnan Tea Mountains, the leaves must come from large leaved trees, and that the final process is sun-drying. What happens in between seems to have some flexibility depending on the region and on the individual tea maker or Tea Master.
This tree is 800 years old
These older leaves are not used to make the tea 


A typical Yunnan mountain village, woks in the foreground
After picking, the leaves are cooled (withered, wilted). The next stage is a short heating and turning process in a wok, resulting in a further softening of the leaf and a partial 'killing' (denaturing) of the enzyme that causes oxidation of the leaf polyphenols. The leaf is then scattered thinly on bamboo trays, turned gently by hand and put out in the sun to dry.
Fresh leaves cooling & wilting
The wok frying process
Leaves drying in the sun 
I'm not sure that this wok stage is always used in the Raw Puer process, but some form of partial leaf cell rupture takes place, even if only by gentle rolling. This cell rupture, together with the sun-drying stage, results in a tea that is unfinished - 'maocha'. This means that there is a partial oxidation of the tea, but that it is also affected by post-oxidation, i.e. it continues to change and develop. Hence the name Shengcha, alive tea. This seems to be connected to the sun-drying process in some way - perhaps the cell structure is more open than when a tea is oven-baked, but that's only a guess on my part.

The process differs from that used for Green, Oolong and Black teas, and makes Raw Puer difficult to classify. I quite like Leo Kwan's category of 'Partially Oxidised Teas', which includes White and Yellow varieties alongside Raw Puer, but others will disagree.




Raw Puer maocha is greyish in colour, twisted and wiry in appearance. The infused tea is a pale greenish-gold colour, and the flavour is a combination of early astringency followed by sweetness and aroma, and in the best teas a thick mouthfeel and cooling finish in the throat. It needs to be infused many times, each infusion lasting no more more than 30 seconds or so. When tasting with the experts I was unable to appreciate all the subtleties of this but enough to get a basic understanding. What is clear is that old trees and individual varieties give a particularly fine flavour, and that the making process has a big impact on the taste. 

On our last day in Yunnan we tasted maocha from wild tea trees, which we all agreed was in a different league from anything else we had tasted. The fact that the farmer walked for five hours up into the mountain to pick the tea, and that it was for family consumption and not for sale, tells its own story.


Tasting the Wild Tree maocha tea with Zhong Xin
This is only the beginning of the process for Raw Puer. It needs to be stored and matured for several years, preferably in the form of pressed cakes. During this time the tea undergoes a secondary ageing process involving natural microbial activity. The conditions in which the cakes are stored are critical to development of flavour and texture during ageing.

The pressing is done in factories, and the finished product carries the factory name rather than the source of the maocha: in most cases it is blended, as the quantities from individual farmers are too small for a pressing batch. I can see that there could be a demand for cakes pressed from specific maocha, probably supplied by a Tea Master, if capacity can be made available to accommodate this.



A variety of Puer cakes

Wrapped and ready for storage


So that's my take on Raw Puer. It's not widely available in the UK, but Fortnum & Mason have a small selection. A wider range is available from those nice people at Canton Tea.


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