The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea - Michael Harney [47]
For many tea drinkers, these musky flavors make puerhs an acquired taste. It’s no surprise the teas are among the most popular in two cities known for their unusual foods—Guangzhou (formerly Canton) and Hong Kong. Those who do acquire the taste often become unusually, almost spiritually, devoted to the tea.
The tea gets its name from Puerh county in China’s Yunnan province, where the style likely originated. In the Tang dynasty (618-907), the region became the starting point for the Tea-Horse Roads, trade routes for tea, horses, and other commodities between China and the Mongols in Tibet. One of the better stories claims that the teas fermented by accident while strapped to the horses during the long journey across the Tibetan plateau. Puerhs remain popular in Tibet today.
Puerhs are prized throughout China as slimming teas. While there are no conclusive studies to prove this, the tea is often said to reduce cholesterol and blood pressure. China’s Yunnan Tea Branch, a prestigious producer of puerhs, also boasts that the tea “quickens your recovery from intoxication.” The company has plenty of experience with the tea, having made puerhs since the company was first established in 1944.
In large part because of its health benefits, the tea has become extraordinarily popular throughout Asia in just the last five years. The tea has seen a big surge in value, to the point where investors now speculate in puerhs. Unfortunately, the speculation has also attracted counterfeiters. It is possible to find a puerh as much as fifty years old, but the older they get, the more likely they are to be fake. It is crucial to buy from reputable sources that get their puerhs from the better factories in Yunnan such as the Yunnan Tea Branch.
The very best puerhs are made from large-leafed tea plants native to Yunnan (see “Yunnan Black Tea,” page 115). The leaves are processed in one of two ways: green or raw (sheng) and a more recent style, black or cooked (shou).
Green puerhs are the most traditional form of the tea. The leaves are fixed green on a hot surface after harvesting, withered until they grow limp, then steamed hot and compressed into cakes. The cakes are wrapped in paper and left to age for anywhere from two to fifty years. It’s possible to buy young green puerhs and age them at home: Keep the cakes in a cool, dry place, away from mildew and damp and out of the sun, and they should last for just over a decade.
Black puerhs are an innovation of just the last few decades. To meet an increasing demand for the tea, researchers found a way to make a sort of imitation puerh that does not require aging. I explain more about this science in the entry on the tea “Loose-Leafed Black Puerh,” page 179.
Both types come in a charming variety of shapes. In green puerhs, the shapes influence the rate and quality of the aging; in black teas, the shapes are just for decoration. They range from bing cha, a flat round disk, to fang cha, a square brick; tuan cha, a melon; and even jin cha, a mushroom. There’s also ping cha, which means “iron tea”—a cake so compact that it’s as solid as iron and is actually hard to break off. But ping cha also boasts even more nuanced characteristics from aging and oxidizing that much more slowly.
As a result of their cake form, with the exception of a few loose-leafed black puerhs, you cannot scoop this tea into a pot with a teaspoon. To brew the tea, begin by breaking off a small chunk of the cake. The cakes can be fairly stiff; if you cannot break off a piece with your hands, use a blunt knife or letter opener to jimmy off a square. You can buy a special puerh knife for this purpose,