Standard Chinese instructions for storing pu’erh: Store in a cool, dry, well-ventilated place.
How to eliminate all aroma, dry out your pu’erh, and/or stagnate the aging process in most areas of the west: Store in a cool, dry, well-ventilated place.

Pu’erh storage for aging in the west is complex. This is largely due to two factors. (a) You’re probably a hobbyist and have enough pu’erh to horrify your relatives and significant other but not enough to fill an entire room. Pu’erh tends to do better in a high density of tea to space, which actually makes it easier for a vendor to store pu’erh. This holds less true if you are indeed a maniac with a room of cakes (#lifegoals). (b) The second problem is the considerably drier climates in Europe and North America. Kunming has a reputation as a pu’erh purgatory, but a good chunk of the west is even drier than Kunming, not to mention Taiwan or Hong Kong. As a result, many people have resorted to DIY storage solutions to combat these. I’ve been chatting with a number of people that have been storing some quantities of pu’erh since 2007-2008 in the effort to research some of the earlier efforts of hobbyists home storing pu’erh. (more…)