To the casuals, pumidors are intimidating.. They’re not something anyone really wants to jump into quickly. For seasoned pu’erh folk, one feature of using a pumidor to store tea is that it tends to scale fairly well if you can get the right size container for your stash. The maintenance and monitoring can be appealing.. But for most normie tea people all the hoops they see people jumping through in pu’erh storage create a significant barrier to entry. But there’s no reason to go pumidor or bust. I’d argue having a low-maintenance pu’erh solution is pretty important for anyone that intends to hold onto a pu’erh cake for even a year or two.

(un)wise words: If you’re comfortable in your living environment, pu’erh will also age well in that environment.

In the search for information on pu’erh storage you’ll sometimes come across folk-wisdom like this that makes longer term pu’erh storage seem awfully easy. Thankfully this sort of advice has become increasingly less common as we’ve learned more, but it is still not difficult to find unwise words of wisdom on tea storage. So why is simply storing tea in your living environment on a shelf a bad idea? Storing it on a shelf is easy and displaying those beautiful tea cake wrappers has appeal. Also, don’t they just store it this way in Asia anyways. So what’s so bad about it?