Green Pu erh? (was Re: A possible future for Puerh

Unlike black and oolong, which are oxidized, Puerh really is fermented.

For a good explanation, see

/Lew

Interesting you should mention that, because I was just browsing through the Upton tea catalog and they list green pu-er not in the pu-er section but in the 'chinese green teas' section and there it's only billed as "Yunnan Compressed Green" or "Yunnan Compressed Green Tuo Cha" tea.. so Upton at least doesn't consider it to be pu-er.

A tea can be compressed without being a Puerh. If you go far enough back in history, all teas were compressed.

/Lew

I e-mailed Upton about that green tuocha, and they responded that it was true green tea, not pu-erh at all. I'm somewhat sucpicious of that, as they don't seem to be the preeminent experts on pu-erh.

For green pu-erh, all the explaining I could do couldn't come near this website:

green pu-erh (upper-left corner of the screen, drop-down menu).

That's a really great site in general, BTW. Mike Petro really outdoes himself sometimes...

ZBL

You can go to Mike's website.

Hi Hugo,

To compare Green Puerh to Green Tea or Black Puerh to Black Tea is not really a fair comparison. Puerh is actually somewhat of a class unto itself.

There is a tremendous amount of misinformation surrounding puerh, often by the very vendors that sell it. There is a green and a black variation of it. It is subjected, either naturally or artificially, to a fermentation utilizing a strain of the aspergillus niger fungi and to oxidation also either naturally or artificially. In the case of black puer it is subjected to an additional "ripening" step.

For more information check out my website, I have attempted to document the differences and I suspect you will find most of the answers you are looking for.

Mike Petro snipped-for-privacy@pu-erh.net

Thanks...

I also found the following website that explains it quite well after I asked the question...

I also found it interesting that they referred to it as a coffee-drinkers' tea. When I first drank it I noted some similarities to coffee, but I assumed that I must be imagining things, or just hadn't had coffee in a long time.

Yes. And don't forget that the tea used in the Japanese tea ceremony was compressed before it was powdered.

/Lew

Oh, I tried one of the Upton Green Tea Tuo-chas and it was definitely not puery... just plain green tea.