Wing Hop Fung - Authentic Aged Puerh?

A 20 year cake for $24, not hardly! A 1950s cake for $200 not hardly!

Look, a 1950s cake can easily fetch $1,000 or more, no vendor would sell it this cheap, especially if they are anything close to being a "Tea Master". If they are in the Tea Business and know puerh at all they would market an authentic 20 or 55 year old to knowledgeable tea people who would pay big bucks.

Authentic $20 year old puerh sells for about $1 a gram, 55 year old puerh sells for $2-$3 a gram. I have heard any number of "tales" explaining why much lower priced deals are possible, yet I have NEVER seen one that was authentic, NEVER.

Email me offline if you want to discuss this in detail.

Mike Petro

Those are typical aged prices you see on the Chinese auction site TaoBao. All you will see is the Zhongcha logo with maybe CNNP labeling. Supposedly each wrapper has enough blemishes so you can chase down the certificate of production mysteriously kept on file in some government file cabinet or basement of a factory. I think the bottom line you have to know the factory taste. If it doesn't taste good now it won't in your lifetime. I have 30 year old loose leaf puer and 20 year old cooked Xiaguan. There is no real difference in what I taste today. Aged fermentation doesn't guarantee anything. Menghai recent crop prices are already at $20. I'd buy recent crops and let others spend their money on aged puer. When I spend more than a penny/gram for tea then I'm simply indulging myself.

Jim

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote:

Jim, I can assure you that even in China you will not get a 50 year old bingcha for $200. If someone offers you one at that price they are ripping you off somehow. I am extremely confident of this fact.

Auction sites are the least trustworthy place to buy antique puerh anyway. Remember the compressed block of red tea you found on TaoBao that was being passed off as a 1950s puerh! Scams like this are common on the auction sites and they are often much more subtle than this and harder to detect.

The only way to buy aged puerh, should you so desire, is to buy it from someone you know and trust, OR to taste the actual tea you buying BEFORE you buy it, assuming you have a taste memory of other authentic aged puerhs.

Also dont forget that aged cooked puerh will seldom develop much more maturity after 7-10 years, so paying extra for 20 -30 year old Shu Pu has little return on the investment. It is only the Sheng Pu or raw puerh that *continues* to develop and mature after 20-30 years. I have

30 year old samples of both Shu and Sheng and I can say that only the Sheng is worth the premium.

Mike.

Anything that costs more than twenty-eight cents an ounce is an indulgence? You must tell me where you buy your tea so cheaply, and just what you get for the money.

stePH

-- NP: Ars Nova, "Danse Macabre"

I don't recommend buying the first 50yo $200 bingcha you find on TaoBao. It is still Caveat Emptor and do some homework. You can say what you want about TaoBao but it ain't the shaddy black market prices of friends who you trust. It's the nature of the way the game is played where sellers can barely survive one negative feedback. I know, I know the prices for whatever are too cheap and expect to pay much more at some Western website who is banking on your stupidity. My biggest frustration with TaoBao I don't know Chinese and I can't order a damn thing. If I'm in China I'm getting anything I want delivered for less than 10y. It beats standing in line at the market behind the lowai.

Jim

Mike Petro wrote:

I'm trying to focus my attention on new Sheng Pu cakes because at least that way I can verify their age because they're brand new and I'm the first or second retail sale.

But I would like to try some more older aged Sheng Pu to get an idea of what to expect or work towards. I'm always surprised that tea vendors don't sell more samples of their aged cakes, because they could probably pull off more profit that way: for example, one could sell whole 350 gram cakes for $200 each OR sell 10g samples at $6-$10 per sample and make as much or more, and I could spend less up front as a consumer for as much tea as I like. Seems like a win-win situation for everyone if there's enough of the aged stuff to go around. I can spend $200 and get samples of several cakes instead of just one, they make a little more money off their investment...

good idea? bad idea? impractical?

One is selling for $23.99, and the claim is that it's about 20 years old. ???

I think it is too cheap to be really 20 years old. from cost, inflation, preserved expense,transportation, tax revenue, profit to calculate the price, then judge genuine or fake.

Learn more about pu-erh tea.

This is the latest of several links from snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com who has recently posted several marketing inspired links disguised as informational sites. Lots of good information on puerh here. My main complaint is that virtually all of it is blatantly copied from other websites and the original authors were not given any credit whatsoever. There isnt anything original at all on this site!

Sites that were directly plagiarized include: this newsgroup the RFDT FAQ the Tea Hub website Tea Hub's blog the Holy Mountain Tea website CofffeeTea.About.Com teasetc.com Pu-erhTea.com the Happyherbalist.com puerhcha.com "The Jasmine Pearl" tea vendor Tentea.com tributetea.com teacoffeeasia.com SevenCups.com StashTea.com OrientalPharmacy.com The late great "Tea Man" teatalk.com

Compiling all this information together in one spot is commendable, I have done something similar on my site, but taking credit for authoring it is not. It is a common courtesy to provide an Author's credit (or link) when quoting passages in their entirety. I only found

2 articles on the entire site that I could not attribute to someone else, and that's probably because I didn't look hard enough.

BTW,

( snipped-for-privacy@china-teapot.com) (the source of these recent marketing inspired info sites) also copied many of their tea descriptions, FOR TEA THEY ARE SELLING, directly from other websites, for example "We Review Teas" was plagiarized for a Da Fang description, Holy Mountain was plagiarized for their Mao Feng description, and Seven Cups was plagiarized for their Yin Gou Mei Cha description. The list goes on and on as most of the tea descriptions on this site were similarly plagiarized. I suspect that many of these vendors who were copied will not like it as I am sure they did not give their permission and most consider their work copyrighted.

I personally find such blatant plagiarism to be very distasteful, not to mention unethical and probably illegal in many countries. This may be acceptable in China, but it is not acceptable here in the West! Consequently, I copied this post to many of the sites who were infringed upon and I hope they voice their displeasure.

What does this say about the teapots these guys sell, not to mention their business ethics?

Mike Petro

Mike, Thank you for bring this to our attention. After browsing through their web site, I found that our Pu-erh Talk (

) section was bluntly plagiarized . Neither did they seek our permission, nor did they credit us for the hard work. This is quite outrages to us.

Rain, or Fan Liu rather, please respect copyright of other people. As a Chinese, I am especially shamed by your or your company's behavior.

Linda

Sorry, I like pu-erh tea recently. i think i make a mistake. So sorry, i will delete this site soon.

I noticed that you just shut down the puerh.info site where you actually claimed a copyright on articles copied from al over the Internet.

Now what about all of those plagiarized tea descriptions etc on

Just about every one of those descriptions was copied from some other site and/or business on the Internet, yet china-teapot has the nerve to claim a copyright on them!

We may be laowai but we are not stupid! If you want to do business with us you need to hold yourselves to a higher level of ethics....

Mike Petro

Any well stocked ethnic store will carry penny/gram tea. That's what the rest of the world only can afford. The British might indulge a little more at 2cents/gram and the Japanese simply don't produce enough and believe in trade tariffs.

Jim

stePH wrote:

Hi Jason,

There are a few vendors that sell samples of their aged sheng cakes, among them Tea Hub and Hou De. Hou De has the advantage of being in Houston and thus offering free and short shipping (assuming you're in North America, that is). Hou De also has smaller samples, where as Tea Hub, to my knowledge, only offers 100g at a time.

Nico

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote:

Space snipped-for-privacy@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com12/5/05

09: snipped-for-privacy@ix.netcom.com

With a nod of approval toward those poor folk who serve hot water from a kettle under the name of white tea, and for whom any tea would be an indulgence, let us take a moment to appreciate the dynamic relative aspects of value and price. It's more often than not the company in which we drink that counts.

Michael

Michael