29/03/2022
What is Puer (Pu-erh) tea?
Puer (Pu-erh) tea is the only style defined by geography. It all comes from a southern region of Yunnan province, because the local cultivars and growing conditions cannot be separated from its identity.
Puer tea can come in a loose or compressed version of two basic styles:
Sheng (“Raw”) Puer: This is a simple, non-oxidized tea whose finished product will change over time because it is air-dried as the final step. This will enable it to continue a very slow process of bacterial and enzymatic fermentation that is outside the bounds of deliberate tea manufacturing processes. To highlight this, sheng puer is often marketed by the year it is made. Young puer tea tends to have a profile of wild fruit and grain (emphasis on “wild”). Older sheng puer profiles depend completely on the conditions of which it is aged, but in many cases it becomes more wild, earthy, and rustic (emphasis again on “wild”) in otherwise unachievable ways.
Shu (“Ripe) Puer: This tea starts out as sheng puer, but then goes through a deliberate “post fermentation” process to mimic and accelerate the kind of changes that happen in sheng puer from a period of many years to six weeks. The outcome is earthy and smooth, but with a leathery, compost, barnyard character (and we mean this with sincere flattery) that some find to be an acquired taste.
Puer tea is difficult to summarize and we suggest you read our blog on Puer for a more detailed description. The proper pinyin spelling is “Puer”, but in the west you will often see it spelled as “Pu-erh” or “Puerh.” These different spellings are all referring to the same thing and don’t signify anything beyond identification.
