13
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Devoted fans pay thousands for this fermented tea, whose decades-old vintages are treated like wine
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- Title
- An Ancient Tea's Journey From Rural Staple to Luxury Import
- Word count
- 324 words
I drink a fair amount of pu'er tea. My wife is (Canadian-)Chinese, and it's one of her favorite types of tea (in Cantonese, it's called something like "bo lei"), so we always have at least one or two varieties of it around. I drink coffee most regularly, but pu'er is one of the teas I drink most often when I feel like drinking something else hot after I've already had my 2 cups of coffee for the day. As the article says, it generally has an "earthy" taste, which I think would probably appeal to most people that enjoy coffee.
There can definitely be a pretty significant difference in taste between different ages/varieties of it. She actually just mentioned the other day that she thinks the new batch we got doesn't taste nearly as good as the previous one, which was a moderately-expensive 25-year-old one (the new one is in the 10-15 range). I'm sure that part of it is just general quality or based on who produced the tea, but the age definitely does seem to be a significant factor too. We also bought some "raw pu'er" this time, which I hadn't tried before and is interesting—it definitely still has the earthy flavor to it, but it tastes more "light" overall and has more bitterness than the ripe kind.
I actually just ran into a wonderful green pu'er for the first time (aged from 2008) a few weeks ago, and I love it -- all the previous pu'er's I've tried have been black, this green dials down the earth / wood tones in the flavor profile a bit and is a much smoother drinking experience for me. Then again, I seem to be the opposite of your tastes, i.e., mainly drink tea, dabble with coffee on occasion, so YMMV
I would be interested to see how these would fare in a blind taste test against similar teas. I've read articles about expensive wine and cheap wine being indistinguishable from each other(Not to be negative or anything)All in all an extremely interesting read about something completely new to me!
I'm sure there's a similar effect here, since the reason it exists with wine is due to our expectation of the wine. I don't see any reason it wouldn't happen with tea. Speaking of, expectations play a huge role in flavor, here's an example of color effecting the flavor of a drink.
Thanks for that graph. Love me some bar graphs. Makes sense as humans are very conditioned, even if we don't like to think so.
Pu-erh tea doesn't have to be crazy expensive, but there is absolutely a high-end niche for it. For example, here's an inexpensive pu-erh for $34/lb, or a pricier one for $49/2.5oz. And that's still cheap compared to the thousands of dollars the article talks about.
I suspect similar to wine, the enthusiasts would claim they can tell the difference between a cheap pu-erh and an expensive one, and some could but many couldn't. If the comparison was between pu-erh and an unfermented green or black tea though, it'd be a night and day difference. I've had very mediocre pu-erh before (the kind you get in individual foil-wrapped teabags at a supermarket) and even that has a very distinctive flavor.
Very interesting! Thanks for explaining that as I have never tried any. I'll have to try for myself now and see. Make use of the Simplex I thirfted from Goodwill outlet.