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Shelf life of loose teas?

Greg,

With all due respect I think you are getting tangled up in language translation issues. Over the years as different people have done business with the USA the translations have varied a bit. Be it right, wrong, or indifferent there are a variety of descriptive terms currently in widespread use in the USA market for the 2 catagories of Pu'er. They are:

Green - Black Sheng - Shu Raw - Ripe Uncooked - Cooked

I have a friend who is a leading Tea broker in Kunming. He is employed by the company that owns the (Yunnang) Tea Market in Kunming as well as several of the booths inside of the Tea Market. He literally brokers tons of Pu-er every month. I can show you many conversations where he uses the terms raw/ripe to describe sheng/shu pu'er. It is all in how it is translated into English.

Along the same lines you will see different translations for the word Pu'er itself, including puer, puerh, pu-erh, etc.

What is the name of your Family Business? What types of tea do you grow/process?

If you are so experienced I am surprised that you would recommend a company (Fah Guo Mountain Tea) who sells expensive Pu'er without even stating the vintage or the factory or even the type of pu'er that it is. I know that this is NOT the way business is done in China. Are you associated with that company somehow?

Regarding the newsgroups, proper newsgroup etiquette (netiquette) dictates that you quote the original post you are responding to, or at least closely follow the thread lines. It makes it much easier to understand which conversation (thread) you are commenting on. See

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for more info on netiquette.

Mike

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Reply to
Mike Petro
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Dear Greg -

It would be real nice if you read the posts of others with proper attention and respect. Michael Plant, who I have an honor to know personally is a very knowledgable and nice gentleman, most probably old enough to be your father. In his post he was talking about paying in extent of $1,000 for puer CAKE, not Keemun. But even if he meant Keemun, it does not warrant your rude "You are crazy" remark. I think you owe him an apology. We always hear that argument from our Chinese friends about them or their parents being tea merchants or tea growers. Same way we were always hearing from our Iranian friends that they are Shah's Pehlevi relatives. That may be so, but we would prefer arguments that can be substantiated in some verifiable way. You also should get yourself familiar with tea terminology commonly accepted in the English-speaking world before you make statements that there is no such thing as "raw pu-erh", because this is how Sheng (ShengRi de Sheng) is translated into English, together with "live, uncooked, green", as opposed to Shu (ChengShu de Shu) "ripe, cooked, done". Many participants on this forum (present party excluded) have live-long connections with tea businesses in China, many have friends who own and run teahouses in HongKong, Taiwan and here in Chinatowns on both coasts. Some of us studied China and its languages and cultures, including tea, for many, many years. Please, do not call us "crazy". The "Tea University" is very much an "introduction" site. In case of pu-erh I very much recommend you to take a look at Mike Petro site

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- not everything is on the surface and you have to dig around there, but its well worth it.

Sasha.

wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...

Reply to
Alex Chaihorsky

Sheng1 in Chinese means raw or uncooked. The leaves are not cooked and it's basically like a green tea. As it ages, it becomes more smooth and not as sharp.

I am in China. I have visited the tea plantations. It is raw/uncooked.

Reply to
Mydnight

Please provide me the factory name and the plantation name; I'll visit on my next holiday.

Reply to
Mydnight

Amen! And I seriously doubt that I'm the only one here who sings in that choir.

Reply to
Derek

Greg,

Do not start with "all due respect" because it usually mean you do not respect the person you are replying to, take it from Donald, he knows...

We are in China and I have been learning pu erh for more than a year now from people including:

  • Master Leung (creator of the recipe of the guang yun gong bing in the
60's and engineer for the China tea export and import company, Guangdong)
  • Master Chen, who is my teacher, whose familly was the first generation pu erh seller in guandgong and opened their first business in 1881 and who was a tea buyer for the CNNP, Guangdong for more than
40 years. He has been dealing and knows all kinds of traditional famous tea everywhere (tea producing areas) in China.
  • Professor Liu - Professor Managing Director for the Research Institue of tea Science and this person's specialty is "pu erh" and is part of the writers of the modern Cha Jing.

Because of these people we also have the extreme pleasure to meet a lot of pu erh collectors and we even have the chance to be able to ask our questions. So, with all due respect, I think they are right when they all say that raw puerh is green.

The material use for pu erh is Shai Qing, which is one kind of the green teas, even after beeing compressed the tea is still green tea. If you take the "zhang ping shui xian bing" (Michael, you tried that peculiar compressed oolong), it is a compressed oolong from Fujian, made with leaves that are from Shui Xian race. Once the leaves are processed, they are compressed, are they still oonlong tea after? Well, yes, they are just compressed oolong.

[Greg]

this >tea is not catagorized as green. In its purest classification, this is >a fully-fermented red tea;

[Seb] Let me enlight you about the Koo Loo tea as we have 3 kg of it that we have made specially for us at the original producing village by a tea farmer whose familly has been producing this tea for a very long time. It is one of the rare green teas that you can age and when aged the liquor do turn red hence maybe you confusion between red and green.

However, I don't know if you have confused it with some other teas, I am talking about the one from Li Shui village, Gu Lao county, Guangdong. Take you Cha Jing, page 169 and you will learn about this tea.

[Greg]
[Seb] I like Fujian, I was there last year for autumn harvest at a tea farmer's plantation in Anxi, and what i found was that Fujian tea farmers do not really like pu erh tea as they think it is dirty. they stick to their lovely oolongs... I have also been to Fuding and Zhenghe, love the white teas too.

SEb

Reply to
SEb

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