What is a Puerh, really? (cont.)

My statement still stands, true Puerh is made from Yunnan large leaf trees. I was only speaking of "what makes puerh a puerh". I like Liu An as well but it is not puerh so I was not referring to it. I have not studied Liu An's processing at all. I guess you could say that I am a puerhist!

I do not know much about the processing of white tea so I am unable to offer a reliable comparison.

I am saying that withering is one of the key differences in the processing of Puerh. The withering stage is long enough to allow the enzymatic action to begin again but on a much more subdued scale. Tea leaves have enzymes in their veins. The amount of oxidation depends upon how much of the enzymes are exposed and for how long.

Now this enzyme killing stage (step 3, steaming, pan firing, etc) may very well be a little different than the green counterpart, this could be one of the differences that the Chinese Factories are reluctant to talk about. Black tea does not get this enzyme killing stage.

Green tea is steamed or pan fried to kill the enzymes and then the tea is typically dried mechanically over a course of minutes, not hours. The whole green tea process typically only takes a few hours from start to finish, it is not allowed to wither in the sun for hours/days so it never has time to start oxidizing again before it was thoroughly dried.

Withering can be, and often is, omitted during the production of green tea, but it is crucial in puerh (also black tea) production. Sun withering is almost exclusively used for puerh. Withering in the sun does allow for the return of some enzymatic action because. 1) not all of the enzymes get killed by pan firing or steaming, and 2) wet organic matter will begin to oxidize again over the course of the hours/days until sufficient moisture has dried away. Had the pan firing not occurred it would have oxidized considerably more rapidly during this withering stage.

Hence there is more enzymatic action (aka Beasties) in the process of making Puerh than there is in the process of making Green Tea.

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

What exactly is the nature of the fermentation in Pu-erh? Does it differ from that of Oolongs? Also, I've heard about a second, "post fermentation" that Pu-erh undergoes. How is this achieved?

--crymad

Mike snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com/30/04

The taste of the Liu An would suggest some similarity of processing with what we can call "classical" Pu-erh. Semantics rears its ugly head. I guess you could call me puerile.

Enzymatic action (aka Beasties)? I thought we were talking about an oxidation process -- interactions with the oxygen of the air causing the leaf to darken. So, the beasties feed on or are encouraged by the enzymes? I'm so confused. (Don't worry; confusion is my life.)

Michael

Linda,

Thanks for adding a couple more pieces to the puzzle. A picture is emerging. Lew, did you get what I imagine to be Chinese characters in Linda's text? It came up code in my mail program.

Michael

snipped-for-privacy@teahub.comrnJEc.24$ snipped-for-privacy@news.sisna.com6/30/04

If you manually set your charset to cn-gb-2312 I think you'll see the right characters. Linda's article doesn't contain a MIME header that indicates the charset, so even the best software is unlikely to display it correctly unless it defaults to that charset.

Cheers,

- Joel

I disagree, it is more than simple semantics. Puerh and Liu An are different teas and come from different base teas. The processing may be similar, I really don't know, but the 2 things that make a puerh are base tea and processing. Liu An does not satisfy BOTH requirements. You will never hear me call Liu An a puerh! They ARE "similar" products but this thread is about "What is a Puerh, really" and Liu An is NOT really.

Snip

It is the enzymes that react with the oxygen to cause the oxidation. Fewer enzymes equals less oxidation.

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

Mike snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com/1/04

I concede (consede, conseed, conceed, whatever).

OK, I'm with you. So what about the beasties?

Hi Mike,

Well that's very interesting but the Puer-kin is not an enzyme. It's a sort of bacteria (kin is the Japanese reading of the character for bacterias).

Puer-kin are "beasties", but enzymes are not. That took me a while to understand that when I was at highschool. In oolong and red tea there is an enzymatic reaction (oxydation that is also called "fermentation"), and no "beasties". In Puer, there are both enzymes for the oxidation and a specific bacteria for the long-run reaction (that is also called "post-fermentation" but should be "bacterial fermentation" ). 2 different phenomenons.

That Puer-kin is naturally living in treebark, and has to be "introduced" into the dried tea leaves. Well, at least that's what they say they do in Xishuangbanna and what the Japanese micro-organism scientists (that are researching the action of that Puer-kin) say about it.

Certainly what you say about sun-drying is essential obtain a good quality Puer tea (and get the require humidity,etc,to allow the puer-kin to develop well). The phenomenon has been discovered relatively recently, during hundreds of years, the teaproducers didn't know there was a Puer-kin and didn't know they introduced it. Your comparison with yogurth is good, in old times, people didn't use any "starter" and that worked because the starter was present in the container for some reason, most bacterias used in food appeared that way, by chance. Here, they happened to store the tea in places where "Puer-kin" was present. That's how I take it when your teacher says it is "not introduced artificially".

Now the yogurt bacterias are cultivated and introduced in the milk. And most people consider it's real yogurt.

The questions about Puer tea are :

-If you introduce the specific bacteria in tea from another place that the Puer area, will they develop with the same effect ?

-Is it still Puer ? if not, that's what ?

As the objective of drinking tea is not just to get that micro-organism , I'd say we have "Puer tea" (from the Puer area), "puerised tea" from other places and tea not-puerised from the Puer area. A bit like wines that are made with the process of champagnisation, but cannot be Champagne unless they are from that origine (+other conditions), and also wines that have the origine and were not prepared by the process.

Kuri

Sorry, pet peeve, I really do like Liu An but unfortunely just about the only place you see it for sale is on a puerh page and they seldom explain the difference. Can any other readers tell us about how Liu AN is processed?

I was referring to the enzymes as your "beasties". Enzymatic action is the closest thing to "beasties" that you get. If by "beasties" you meant something else like cultures of some microbe/mold/spore or whatever then I am not aware of any such thing.

An interesting note, that site you gave me this morning calls "Blue" tea "half fermentation". Our other buddy keeps saying "sun dried blue", this backs up the notion that the withering step is a form of "half fermentation".

Kuri, this is great stuff. Do you have any references you can give us to support this. I have heard rumors of the existence of something like this but have never seen anything concrete to substantiate it. I have spoken with many in China who have told me that nothing like this is introduced. However, these were tea people not scientist.

Is "Puerh-Kin" a bona fide name or just a nickname? A quick google did not turn up anything with this name. This "tree-bark", is it from a specific tree? I know that Puerh is often placed on wooden racks after processing; I guess it's possible that bacteria in the wood could spread this way.

Please do not take my skepticism personally, I have literally spent years diligently researching this stuff and I have not found anything substantial or verifiable, not a single authoritative text substantiating the "bacteria theory"! These references are as close as I have ever come:

TributeTea.com says: "Puerh tea is fermented with mold. When the desired color, aroma, and flavor have developed, the mold is carefully removed to prevent spoiling." but I have not been able to substantiate this claim anywhere else.

In an article published in the China post on 8/30/2000 titled "Chinese tea found to lower cholesterol" they refer to puerh as "a special bacteria-fermented Chinese green tea" but they do not elaborate on it at all.

There is another brief reference at

Another quote I found was "During the withering process some of the leaves are allowed to rot to produce bacteria."

Another quote I found was "Pu-erh teas, from the Yunnan province of China, are unique due to a true fermentation, not the oxidization used for other teas. Bacteria may be added to processed green tea leaves that are then placed in damp caves to age for up to 60 years. As a result of this storage, the leaves take on an earthy flavor."

Mike

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

Hi Mike,

A "nickname" , a shorter name it means litterally "puer + bacteria/microbe". It is probably puer-cha something-kin. There should be a scientific Latin name.

No idea. That "Puer-kin" is probably native of the rain-forest of South Yunnan. There are other teas with bacterias (Yellow teas for instance), but the Puer-beasties are unique.

Maybe. I was told it is introduced. My little Japanese guidebook of Chinese teas says it used to appear "accidentally" (when they just meant to store the compressed green tea) but is now introduced. I've seen it on TV shows, the kind that explains health benefits of food they interview briefly the researcher and give sometimes over-simplified filmed explanations, but they are not reputed to give fake information. They said "historically" Puer was stored in different ways, sometimes on wooden racks as you say, sometimes buried or as you found placed in damp caves, etc.

I understand your doubts. You have already asked on this NG, I have looked for references in English and didn't find any. I didn't even get an accessible version of the scientific research in Japanese.

It is sure that research exists. The problem is to read it. There is sort of Iron Wall between the scientists' world and ordinary people like us.

It seems a lot of it is in the thesis of :

I. Tomila and M. Sano, Laboratory of Health Science in School of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Shizuoka University, Japan

That's not the sort of readings you get at the local library or in bookstores. Japanese universities are very closed, you can't do like in the US and Europe, go to any uni library and look for a publication. A friend has tried for 3 years to be allowed to use the library of ethnology of Osaka for her reasearch and they keep saying they'll let her in when she can show a student or teacher card of their attached uni. So unless, that thesis has been published outside the uni world, forget it.

By surfing google, I have found that Professor Kanzo Sakata that seem to a be specialist of our musterious beasties :

In Google, you'll get dozens of hits in Chinese with :

普洱茶中的麴菌

In Japanese, hundreds of hits with プーアール 菌　(puer + kin) The articles on webpages are not interesting (I didn't check them all...), they only say that exists with no detailed explanation.

Well frankly, I don't want to read Sakata's reasearch as that'd be too technical and chemical. Is it possible there is nothing "in between" the one line explanation and the tea-Einstein's thesis ?

Kuri

Thank you Kuri, I hereby stand corrected and I truly appreciate it. If you run across any other reference PLEASE email me. I will try to muddle through the scientific mumbo jumbo. I really have a need to understand this. I have also confirmed the existence of bacteria with my Chinese mentor last night. Apparently we misunderstood each other when I asked this question the last time. Misunderstandings are common, if you saw our IM conversations you would see that we often struggle with simple concepts.

He raised as many questions as he answered but here are some highlights.

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

Hi Kuri,

My newsreader didn't understand the encoding, can you please send me those characters in an email?

Thank you,

Mike

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

No problem. I should have written it in the title, the encoding of my post was UTF-8 unicode and both Chinese and Japanese fonts are necessary to read the 2 lines in characters.

Kuri

Hi Kuri,

I see the Chinese characters. I see the Japanese character for KIN but nothing for PUER (at least the MS CJK unicode set is free). Something to do on the 4th walking all over Chinatown asking do you have any of this stuff. Another great representative tea post of "asked and answered" without surfing useless urls. I'll also take the picture from the recent Tie Guanyin post and see if I can find that particular brand with it's sexy leaf. If I can't find that brand I'll try some other expensive version and see after all these decades it was my wallet causing the dislike and not my tastebuds. My local tea vendor got some expensive TG I like about $10/100g YOWZER!!! I've been converted and damn the 5th infusion tastes like the first ;-).

Jim

Hi Space Cowboy,

It's not in "characters" but in katakana, the phonetic writing Japanese use for foreign words (the second character of puer is not in the standard Japanese fonts, they can't input it). To see it an additional set of fonts is needed. You can probably live without it. That writing is necessary if Mike wants to see the frequency of the puer+kin Japanese pages on google.

I have never regretted buying teas that were relatively expensive or even frankly not in my means. It's sure a good product, storage, freshness, and everything has a cost. But that makes a real difference in the cup. Especially for Oolongs that have been mass-produced in abysmal quality. That can be night and day.

I've made a strange bargain in Chinatown-shopping. I've found at a discount store Lotus tea in a nice wooden box (with "cha" or "tra" ? pyrograved in Vietnamese calligraphy). It was a old, I knew it, it didn't cost more than an empty box. When I opened it, it looked like and tasted like unflavored cheap black tea, no lotus flavor. Forgot it, but last week I intented to re-use the box for pencils, so I gave a try to the leaves in cold infusion. There was a little miracle : in cold water, the leaves take back their green color and flavor and the lotus fragrance is also revived. It's very refreshing. Great for this season.

Kuri

I understand why Western alphabets can't incorporate ideograms. But I thought using a bad example that McDonald's in Chinese or Japanese was itself an ideogram that didn't require change. For those without unicodes or font sets and normal newsreaders you could capture a graphic picture of the window and whittle it down with an editor (reduce size) to show the ideograms of interest and include that in your posts. Unfortunately Google usenet will filter out any graphics.

For the past two years I've been buying 'expensive' teas from a local tea shoppe that opened nearby. It boasts a 100 different teas but I enjoy the banter with the retired British engineer owner. The last trip he showed me how he removed the plunger arm on French presses so the strainer in now part of the lid. I will admit I enjoy his oolongs which are my absolute favorites over anything I can buy in the ethnic stores. But I still enjoy my 'cheap' teas and there is nothing better than commercial blends from Britain. I just finished a cup of 'expensive' Dimbula and I can't say it is worth the price of a 'cheap' Dimbula. I think pricing in tea is supply and demand. Tea is like oil it should be cheap and when it isn't I feel there is a cartel somewhere. In this case I clean up at his sales. He didn't like his Java teas but I do. They're very strong so a little goes a long ways.

I've got some 10 year old Lotus Blossom so I'll give it a try. From the beginning I never liked it hot so I'll try it cold. This is the reason I love Usenet so much. It is give and take with people around the world. It's not a lifeless WWW url.

Jim

Very informative, Kuri. Puerh's shroud of mystery continues to be lifted.

Another parallel can perhaps be found in natto, where the bacterial "starter" is naturally found in the straw wrapping enclosing the cooked beans.

So, is this what defines what is a Puerh, really? Controlled rot?

--crymad

Sorry but missed most of this long and interesting posting. If you tell me who needs which characters, I will try to send hime/her a Word file with Chinese characteres in vectorial grafic (any preference for the font?) L

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