In my first couple years of drinking pu’erh I sampled heavily. Many vendors and many different teas. While I originally did not go into it with a goal of trying specifically young pu’erh, this ended up making a pretty strong majority of pu’erh that I sampled. This is due to a few factors. One is that there’s a predictable vendor drop with the harvest, sometime in late Spring/early summer or in mid-Autumn. This generates demand and buzz amongst the tea community. The second is that young pu’erh makes up the vast majority of raw pu’erh being sold to the west. If you put together a list of the five most popular western pu’erh-centric vendors and listed all of the teas they’ve released in the past year and randomly picked 10, you’d likely end up with ~8 or so being young pu’erh. You actually need to be pretty intentional about not picking young pu’erh if you want to try a different category of raw pu’erh..
(more…)Tag: Bitter Leaf Tea
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2019 Pu’erh from Western Vendors are More Expensive Than Ever. Three Ways to Look at Price.
I’ve been updating a spreadsheet on pu’erh prices on release for the past few years in order to get an idea of tea being offered to western consumers and any possible trends. The well-known popular narrative is that fresh pu’erh prices have gone up and this certainly seems true in the data. Last year the prices looked about the same as the previous year. And when and how much the price has gone up depends on how we look at this and there’s a handful of different ways to look at the data and options available (I do three here).
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How Much Does Ripe Pu’erh Cost from Western Vendors?
Since I’ve crunched a bunch of numbers for other pu’erh categories, I figured I should do the same for ripe pu’erh. Ripe pu’erh is not exactly the most talked about tea, but it is generally considered to be affordable and there’s enough options easily accessitlbe to keep most people satisfied. I compiled all the ripe productions sold by popular western pu’erh sources: White2Tea, Crimson Lotus Tea, Bitter Leaf Tea, Chawangshop, and Yunnan Sourcing, limiting the massive Yunnan Sourcing selection to 50 teas (still more than any other vendor). It’s also important to note that this data shows the cost of ripe pu’erh for a western audience and doesn’t necessarily imply much about the ripe pu’erh market in east Asia. (more…)
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Datapost: The Dearth of Aged Pu’erh Available From Western Facing Vendors
It’s no secret that aged pu’erh is scarce out west. The western vendor scene is dominated by vendors traveling to Yunnan bringing back predominantly young tea to sell. For this exercise, I added all of the older teas from western vendors I could think of. Unlike some of my other data compilations, this one didn’t take long at all.. The cutoff for aged pu’erh (both raw and ripe) was set at 18 years (2000 and older). Setting it at 18 years puts it firmly above semi-aged, but also not high enough (25 years) where we would have no teas making the cut. It’s a number that’s probably going to annoy some people off because its too low and others because it isn’t high enough (ask Su what aged tea is!). (more…)
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You Can Buy Young Pu’erh From All Over Yunnan
The custom private label pu’erh has really thrived in the western market – with vendors increasingly sourcing their own pressings directly from Yunnan. This was a new thing for westerners back in 2009 when just Yunnan Sourcing and Essence of Tea pressed tea. Now it is almost a rite of passage for a pu’erh-centric vendor, and we have access to a sleuth of options all over Yunnan. (more…)
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The Western Pu’erh Scene is Really Dominated by Modern Young Pu’erh
For people looking to learn about pu’erh I usually recommend picking a western-facing, pu’erh-centric, vendor and ordering a bunch of samples that cover a few different categories (my suggestion: young raw pu’erh, semi-aged raw pu’erh, and ripe pu’erh). Most pu’erh vendors feature teas from two or all three categories but the focus of pu’erh-centered western vendors has drifted towards just one of those three — young raw pu’erh. (more…)
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No Frills. 18 Quick Hits, Less Premium Young Tea Report
One of the perks (or drawbacks) of having a blog is literally drowning in tea/samples. I’m not really in the market for young tea, especially not cheaper young tea. This is mainly because I don’t drink these teas nearly often enough and the number of samples I cross path with are more than enough to satiate my sporadic young tea craving. As a result, I cranked through this batch of samples pretty quickly in a series of shortish sessions.. Here’s some quick impressions on thoughts on teas I’ve had recently that were priced beneath the Fomo Report on more premium teas (>$0.40/g). (more…)
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FOMO. 2016 Premium Young Tea Report
If you have been living in a cave with your pu’erh stash for the past 15 years and arejust reemerging to restock your stash, I have some news for you. You should’ve bought apple stock. And google. And loads of pu’erh. Young pu’erh is expensive now. There was a time not so long age when three figure young pu’erh was considered an outrage. Now it’s commonplace and very easy to spend over $100 for a tiny little 200g beeng that may not even be that good. (more…)