A skeptic among the druids

Lewis

I am no expert on pu-er tea. But since you ask, I spent 30 minutes looking at some Chinese books on any comments on tea coming out of the

70s. This is what I found, judge it for yourself.

According to author Xu Chuan Hong, tea produced by meng hai, kun ming, xia guan, ling qiang and pu-er cha factories in the 1970s and 1980s are now highly sought after. In the social planning environment, the factories are less profit focus. They are highly knowledgeable and experienced, and exercise great care in tea-leaf selection and processing methods.

Pu-er tea produced more recently are not bad, but there is a lack of centrally imposed standard, the factories are less innovative. The market is also diluted by copiers.

[that seems to the case for longjing tea as well, in which I have some dealings with]

He also mentioned that fermented pu-er tea was invented in the 1970s, but at that time, such tea used the courser, older leaves compared to the post 1990.

It also says that good pu-er is formed from a combination of many complex factors and it's difficult to put it to any single factor.

:)

Julian

I hit sanzui and the tea websites with a chat board occasionally with a translator. You can tell it is a gold mine of tea information obfuscated by the translation. It is my goal one day to make more sense than what an online translator tells me.

Jim

Lewis Perin wrote: ...

Amen to that.

Mine too.

/Lew

Thanks!

Less innovative in the absence of a "centrally imposed standard"? That's counter-intuitive.

Right; that would be shu (cooked, ripe) Pu'er.

When he says "older", he doesn't mean from old trees, does he? Probably he means bigger leaves from later in the growing season, I would think.

Indeed!

/Lew

The standard only specifies the quality needed to meet the grading standard. So it actually free the producer to concentrate on the quality, rather than on the marketing and profiteering. I think.

Yes, older leaves, not trees.

Interesting, I learn a couple of thing about pu-erh. Thanks. I still have a so called 30 years old that I can't tell the good from the one :)

Julian

Hi Lew,

I don't think size has anything to do with anything, really. First of all, the size of the leaf depends greatly on the sort of leaves picked, and the season it was picked in. Fall leaves will be bigger than spring leaves. I think that's pretty obvious. Size has nothing to do with age, like your friend pointed out. Different regions also have different sizes, from what I've seen, and thus using size as an indicator is a sure way to druid-hell, I think.

I have seen/heard various methods for identifying old tree leaves vs young tree leaves. Personally, I don't know if any of them really hold any water, at this point. All I know is that there seems to be a difference in the way it acts in your mouth and on your body, and that, I think, is really the only good indicator.

telling you that a particular cake from 70s, 80s, or even early to mid

90s was made purely of one region or old tree leaves is lying to you.

for maocha for plantation and old tree tea was the same. In fact, old tree tea might've been cheaper, because they were more difficult to get to and in some cases, less desirable by those standards back in the day. When prices are equal, there's obviously no need to differentiate them, so the likelihood of anybody selling tea/making tea who distinguishes them clearly would be.... low.

The whole old-tree business, afaik, started in the mid 90s when people were trying to recreate Red Label or earlier cakes, and they think the key to that is not using plantation leaves of new, young trees, but rather older ones. That is about as much as I know.

Personally, I'm not entirely sure if there's a huge difference. That said, you can definitely tell the difference sometimes when the tea is in your mouth, so all we can do, I think, is just going by our instinct and hope for the best.

MarshalN

Thanks for the news. I was tempted to say "thanks for the bad news", but I'm not sure about that.

Assuming that nobody will come up with a persuasive argument against what MarshalN's said, there may be consolations for those who want to know how to find Pu'er worthy of aging. (What follows is just speculation, of course; I've met tea farmers, but I'm not a tea farmer.)

First of all, it's good to be reminded that you need to rely on your own sensory apparatus as you experience the tea. (I won't go into the details here.)

But also, it brings to the foreground other factors that might account for high-quality, age-able maocha:

- the farmer's skill and care in growing the crop;

- the farmer's skill and care in picking and drying the leaves;

- possibly, the farmer's avoidance of artificial means of increasing yield.

Let me get even more speculative now. Maybe the fact that old tree leaves tend to make good young Pu'er means that old trees are more a proxy for good cakes than a direct cause of good cakes. Maybe the bad cakes come not so much from plantation farming per se as from sloppy, hasty plantation farming, and maybe old-tree farming is less vulnerable to shoddy work one way or another.

There are any number of practices, I suppose, that could come under the heading of bad tea farming. Maybe a tea agronomist can answer this question: assuming a farmer is determined to saturate his soil with fertilizers and pesticides, is it possible that old trees, with their deep roots, would be less affected than younger bushes?

Another thing that comes to mind is that the leaves on reasonably tall trees will probably get less sunlight in the course of the day than the leaves on pruned bushes in uninterrupted rows. There are tea people in both China and India who think you get better quality leaf by avoiding full sunlight all day long.

/Lew

Aha - this is interesting. Some people claim that shu Puerh improves with age. I've had a few going back to the putative original of this style, and didn't detect any benefit to long storage. Assuming that this is sometimes true, however, perhaps it has nothing to do with aging at all, but with the quality/qualities of the mao cha used in earlier decades?

-DM

Thre are a host of questions emerging from this thread, some of which have a botanical basis.

I worked in Yunnan during the mid 80's and have on my wall a dried leaf of "Yunnan Large Leaf" cultivar - it is 11" long, whereas the largest leaf I could find in Assam is but 8.5" long. Now those leaves come from the maintenance layer i.e fully grown mature leaves. Tea is non deciduous so Fall leaf is not bigger than Spring leaf. It grows from a bud, gets bigger to maturity, stays on the plant for 2-3 years then falls off, so you can find big leaf (and small leaf) on the plant all year round. This big leaf on my wall is from a "row crop" plant but the few old plants I saw in Yunnan had mature leaf of similar, certainly no bigger, size.

(Julian) > but at that time, such tea used the courser, older leaves compared to

Now while pu erh may be made from "big leaf old trees" it is for sure is made from the younger (and much smaller) tips not the real coarse old grandpappy maintenance leaf - though I confess I do not know exactly which of the tender leaf makes the best pu erh (compare rule of thumb: 1 Leaf & Bud for white tea, 2L&B for orthodox black and most green teas, 3L&B for CTC black, 4L&B for oolong).

Reasons why pu erh may be better from old trees are:

Old tree owners may themselves be older and more tradional and therefore be more careful in plucking suitable leaf for their pu erh than row crop growers of tea making cooked pu erh .

Old trees are grown in traditional shady spots and the leaves (particularly older ones) may have built up a unique surface flora of fungi and bacteria which, when the tea is aged gives a character that cannot be matched by "cooking" (I prefer the term composting). Much as a Roquefort cheese cannot be made in Stilton, nor vice versa.

Older leaf (though not the chewy old leaf) will have a different balance of chemicals than younger leaves (certainly less caffeine and less catechins but more amino acids and sugars as teh older leaves are used as temporary storage tissue) - this change in balance may influence final tea quality.

(Lew)

I doubt that farmers harvesting from the traditional old trees would succumb to these chemical get rich quick tactics, it is really a plantation mentality. But if an old tree were fertilized with NPK under normal rainfall I would expect fertilizer leaching to full 5 meter root depth within 12 months of application.

(Lew again)

Properly grown hedges of tea will meet together wiythin a few years. Light interception by the flush and the maintenance layer is pretty much 100% meaning its virtually night below the bushes. Tea grown as a natural tree never achieves that degree of interception so on average a mature leaf on the tree sees more light tahn teh close packed leaf within tea hedges.

I really would like to know exactly which leaf maturity (i.e. in leaf numerical position on the shoot) is plucked for good pu erh - any one know that for certain, either now or historically?

Nigel at Teacraft

This makes sense to me, but maybe tea plants that have been allowed to become trees are more likely to be shaded by other trees - "traditional shady spots" above - than are the shrubs in neat rows, even fully joined rows?

/Lew

Hail druid Lew!

I think MarshalN and Nigel have about answered your questions, so I won't repeat his words. Here's something that might be of interest to you, linked to the questions you asked, which may shed more light on the answers you seek...

1. The vendor's classification of trees and their botany definitions vary, so I'm going with the vendor's classification here: tea plants are generally classified as Wild Grown, Old Tree (arbor?), and Plantation Grown. Wild Grown is a tree that is grown from seed, Old Tree is grown from grafting, and may be semi-cultivated, or left to grow in the wild. Plantation Grown I think, needs little explanation. If a tree is grown from the seed and planted in a plantation, it is considered Wild Grown, even if it fully cultivated. These said, a lot also depend on the the location of where the trees are grown, whether wild, semi, or plantation, not to mention the way the tea is processed. In other words, Wild Grown may not be Old, Wild Grown may not be Arbor, Wild Grown may not even taste good.

1. The shape of leaves from a Wild Grown tree can be irregular - the leaves from two branches on the same tree may not look the same, I think this is due to some genetic disposition. However, since what we see are pressed leaves, it is difficult to tell them apart.

2. Taste is a more truthful way of telling the types of tea apart, and where it is not possible to taste, we non-professionals can only do some guesswork on the appearance of the leaves to 'tell' if the leaves are Wild Grown or otherwise. The 'let's examine the leaves' way is not really the best way, given that we are not botanists, the thick veins and thick blades rule, as it was pointed out, may be leaves from different seasons. For Wild Grown, one may need a magnifying glass and search for the down (fur) on the leaves. Shoots and young leaves of Wild Grown tree have very little or no down at all, as compared to the others. The colour of the processed maocha (baked or sundried) from a Wild Grown is much darker than the rest, a blackish dark green. However, the ultimate indicator, as said before, is the taste. It does not taste like pu'er in the initial rounds, at least the ones I know, with a unique residual taste in the mouth. If you live close to a chinese fresh food market, ask if they sell fresh chinese olives. Bite into one, and after the sourness has worn off, there is lingering taste in the mouth that is faintly bitter and quite astringent - that would be close to what a Wild Grown pu'er would taste like. Bitterness and bite - a Wild Grown pu'er is usually lacking in both of these, which are more attributed to Plantation tea. Fragrance - Plantation tea usually comes with a higher floral note that is tight in bouquet, intense even. Old Tree, while the taste is not as bitter but with bite, has a deeper wider floral note. Wild Grown tea reminds me of a walk in the forest after the rain. A Ming period tea lover Xu Cishu wrote: Tea plants that are often fed with fertiliser will strive well, but its nuances weak. This is something the tea makers noticed, and hence the art of blending came about. In the case of a wrapper claiming Wild Grown, or Wild Arbor, there is a high chance that the leaves inside are blended, though hopefully with a higher percentage of truly Wild Grown or Old Tree leaves. If we are to look at unblended pu'er, of the three, Old Tree seems to hit a balanced note on bitterness, bite, fragrance and naunce, and is the preferred choice of the consumer, taste-wise though, some might find it too singular, unlike the multi-layering of the Plantation type. There will always be consumers who like Plantation teas for the 'kick' in the tea, and those who prefer the singular, unwavering taste in Wild Grown or Old Tree.

Danny

I think Wild Grown is a translation of Ye Sheng, isn't it? And maybe a more accurate translation, especially since you point out that there is "wild grown" taidicha, would be Wild *Born*, right?

So really, sorting Pu'ers into three groups this way is conceptually messy. You would certainly expect a young shrub grown from seed to yield leaves with different properties from the leaves of an old seed-grown tree. So it would make sense to have four categories (at least) rather than three. I'm wondering, though, if Old Tree and Plantation Grown are necessarily opposites, for it's at least possible to keep an old, waist-high tea bush yielding for many decades; this certainly is common in Darjeeling. If you accept that Old Tree and Plantation Grown are independent variables, then you have eight categories!

Wouldn't *everything* about trees grown from seed vary more widely than among clones? (Here I'm talking about variation from plant to plant, not within a single tree.) So tea from a bunch of adjacent seed-grown trees, even if harvested the same morning, would in effect be a blend?

Sorry, but I can't make sense of the last sentence. Doesn't it contradict what comes before?

Do you mean blending was used to supplement plentiful, insipid, highly-fertilized leaf with a bit of traditionally cultivated leaf?

Here you mean blending with clonal plantation tea, right?

/Lew

Wild Born would be most appropriate, but can a plant be born?...calling linguists...

Let me see...1. Wild Grown 2. Old Wild Grown 3. Seed Grown in plantation environment 4. Old Tree once cultivated and then abandoned 5. Old Tree once cultivated, left on its own, and is still cultivated once in a while by the minority tribes 6. Plantation shrubs 7. Plantation trees 8. High Altitude Wild Grown 9. Lower Altitude Wild Grown 10. High Altitude Old Tree 11. Lower Altitude Old Tree 12. High Altitude Plantation 13. Lower Altitude Plantation...like I stressed, we are not botanists...keeping it at 3 categories is much simpler to understand...the importance as mentioned by the others, is not what you know about the trees, but what you know about the taste. I don't think either of us are going deep into the mountains in Yunnan and take up a course in botany anytime soon, but we are drinking the tea, it would be more importance for us to know the taste profiles of these categories. I'm sure you have some teas that are labelled Wild Grown or Old Arbor, taste them, and look for the differences and compare these to one from the plantation.

Yes and No. I mentioned the irregularity of shapes, not its contents...I think essentially, even in Darjeeling, the leaves picked from the vast area of the plantation might be considered blends, since plots of soil may contain different amount of minerals, the amount of sun, dew, etc, on one area might be more than another...

Erh, nope~ let me try it once more. Wild Grown: almost not bitter, mildly astringent, low on the fragrance, the smell reminds me more of a walk in the forest after the rain, a smell that is slightly pungent, deeply vegetal, a smell that doesn't clog up the nostrils, but spread deep into the lungs...gag me before I get too lyrical...

It depends. Sometimes only other plantation leaves are used to supplement the nuances and complete the note profiles. In the past (60s-90s), Wild Grown and Old Tree leaves were not seen as porbably maocha material. These leaves that were harvested by the minority tribes were mostly bought by the processing plants cheaply, and blended in to the pressing not because they were good, but mostly because more cakes could be produced this way. These days, the reverse is true...if we do the math, we'll wonder how many Wild Grown and Old Trees there have to be to produce so many "Wild Grown" "Old Arbor" labelled cakes...

Yuppy.

Danny

Hey Nigel mate, good to have you onboard!

To add on your bit, although I can't really comment on pu-erh, but from what I know about green and oolong tea plants, (again no scientific proof) the older plants (those past maturity) produced less each year, but with higher quality. The tea plants I have in mind are those 18 Longjing tea plants spotted by Emperor Qianlong couple of hundreds of years ago.

The same for tea plants grown in high attitude (probably past the optimum high).

Again, quoting from a source:

Pu-erh tea leaves can be picked in four seasons. Spring tea is the best and is picked from February to April, the best being 14 days after Qing Ming (5 April). A standard pick being 1 bud 1 leaf.

Summer tea is picked from May to July and is the second best.

Autumn tea is picked from August to October, being third best.

Winter tea is less available, they are normally consumed by farmers themselves.

Julian

Of course it's about what happens once you take the tea into your mouth. I'm sorry if it seemed I was veering into pedantry. But when I'm trying to understand something influenced by several factors, I find it useful to try to break out all the factors, at least conceptually, into a grid. Some of the cells in the grid will be unimportant, maybe because they basically never happen; clonal old tree might be an example of this. I think you were joking, at least partially, in introducing some new categories, but some of them definitely are used, at least in marketing.

/Lew