A Tea Addict's Journal

Aging puerh

October 22, 2012 · 21 Comments

Why do we store puerh? Why do you store puerh?

Let’s say you consume 10g of puerh a day. That’s a pretty generous amount for most people, since you’re likely to drink other kinds of teas, and 10g for personal consumption, assuming you don’t drink with others on a very regular basis, is quite a bit. So in a year, that’s 3.65kg, or just around 10 cakes of 357g each. In other words, to satisfy your annual puerh consumption of 10g a day, you need 10 cakes. If you are sitting on 100 cakes, and quite a few of us are, you are sitting on a ten year supply of tea. Clearly, that’s not tea meant for immediate drinking.

So many of us, if not almost all of us (shu drinkers who buy one or two cakes at a time and only re-up their supply don’t count) are buying puerh to age. There are of course a few possible reasons why that’s the case. The first, and is probably the most often cited one, is because we want to drink aged teas, but don’t want to pay aged tea prices. If we look at what the aged tea price involves, I think we can break it down to the following components

Aged tea price = original tea cost + time value of money + storage costs + scarcity premium + additional value of aged taste

So, naturally, a cake of tea that cost $100 in year 1 should, theoretically anyway, cost a little more in year 2, because the opportunity cost of forgoing the investment income from the $100 plus the storage cost should be worth something. In this current environment, the opportunity cost is pretty negligible, unless you happen to be a financial wizard. Storage cost, depending on your location, is always non-zero, but is also relatively negligible. So in year 2, your tea might be worth $102, and in year 3, $104, so on so forth. Of course, you may feel that a fairer measure would be inflation-indexed, so maybe you should benchmark the opportunity cost to inflation, rather than the returns on treasury notes. That might bump it up another percent or two, but still, not a whole lot.

The other things, however, are the kickers. The first, scarcity premium, is a real problem. For example, for teas that are well known but which were relatively limited in production, the price of the cake can be driven almost entirely by this premium. The Yuanyexiang that was made famous by a bunch of magazine and other writers online took off that way, and the prices are now something like 1000 RMB, for a tea that really isn’t all that great, even now, ten years later. When I bought them, it was almost 200 RMB. That was six years ago, and I thought it was pretty expensive. Has the tea improved so much that they are now worth 5x as much? No. It’s all about scarcity, and the fact that there are more people chasing the tea than there are teas available, so the prices keep going up and up, even though in recent years folks have started chasing other things and its price rise has stagnated.

We see similar movements in teas from regions that are considered good and low in production volume. Lao Banzhang old tree teas, for example, are in that category. There isn’t much of it to begin with, and so now anything that has a whiff of Lao Banzhang in it is priced astronomically, even when new. A lot of times they’re not even very good, or simply fake (using teas from neighbouring villages, etc). While the quality is there for the real stuff, a lot of it is not of that quality and is instead something inferior, but the scarcity premium is applied anyway.

Then there is the aged taste term, which I think is what we are all actually looking for when we store our own teas. We want our teas to age, and to age well, so that twenty years from now we have nice aged teas to drink. Many of us, especially those of us from or live in Asia, got started in this hobby because we tried incredible aged teas, and want to replicate that experience. The problem with this is twofold. The first is, in a lot of cases those aged taste may not be what you’ll end up getting in the end. Storing crap is not going to land you with a well aged tea, because crap only age into aged crap, not aged nectar. Picking out teas that will age well is not easy, and there are conflicting theories as to what will make a good aged tea. That’s a difficulty.

The second problem is that there are lots of risks with aging, and it has real costs disassociated with the time value of money and the storage costs. For example, you run the risk of ruin – mold, fire, flood, mice, children, among many other possible bad things that can happen to your tea. Some are recoverable, others not. A kid drooling on your cake is probably ok; the same kid decorating your cake with permanent marker, not ok. I know of at least a handful of friends who stored teas and have met unmitigated disasters during the process. It’s a real threat, not imaginary.

There are two other problems related to this. The first is one that I think will start manifesting itself in the coming years – some areas of the world just aren’t very good for storing tea. Kunming, for example, falls into this category, and I think some places, like Los Angeles, will as well. Hster’s samples from the Bay Area are not promising either. However, these things don’t show their colours until you’ve tried storing it there, for years, before they become apparent. Also, exact locations in the house, where the house is situated, and other micro-climate issues may affect the tea, positively or negatively.

The other problem is more fundamental – that the aged taste may not be to your taste. This, I think, is a real risk among many who come into this hobby not through the old tea way, but who start out drinking young teas and then only occasionally have access to one or two samples of older teas. Such drinkers might have a great appreciation of what younger puerh offers, and may very well be a very sophisticated drinker of young puerh. However, if they buy lots of tea, by definition not all of it will be consumed, and when aged, they might not be to the taste at all.

I’ve encountered folks like this in China. Some can tell me, with great precision, which village a tea is from. However, for the most part, they drink younger (10 years or less) teas on a regular basis, and have little experience with older teas, regardless of provenance or type. So they can get confused when presented with something older, aged in a more humid climate (not traditionally stored) or not of single village origin. For drinkers like this, I think the fun is in trying to figure out where things are from, in learning the different characteristics of the villages, etc, and not so much in the aging process. I’m not sure if it’s such a good idea for them to buy a lot of tea to age, because, frankly, they might not end up liking it.

To many, this is of course anathema to what puerh is about – puerh needs to be aged, and I generally agree with that. We do also need to recognize that the hobby is changing a bit, first from traditional storage to the proliferation of home natural storage, and now, to a different way of enjoying the hobby – trying to figure out origins, terroir, etc, things that are generally absent from the older teas because they were almost all big factory blends, unless you go all the way back to pre-1949 teas. I do think there’s a need to recognize and perhaps even separate the different sides of the hobby. When we say a tea is good, do we mean good now? Good later? Good to age? Under what conditions? For whom? I’m pretty sure a bitter, smoky tea stored for decades in, say, Alberta, is probably still going to be bitter, smoky twenty years hence. How many twenty years does one have in a lifetime?

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21 responses so far ↓

  • Gero // October 22, 2012 at 2:01 pm | Reply

    Thank you so much for this post! On a German internet tea forum we are having a discussion about the proper storage of sheng – and you just detailed all the problems / doubts I have about aging sheng at home.
    Just one more argument in favour of buying aged tea instead of trying to age it yourself: as you mentioned a bing of 2012 sheng might well cost about $100. But there are good (admit it, they are not breathtaking) and reliable bing of a more matured type for well below the $100 threshold (thinking of a Guangzhou stored Mengku from 2003 which I like a lot – at only $65). So I don’t see the benefit in trying to age tea at home – well, apart from curiosity, that is.

    • MarshalN // October 22, 2012 at 10:58 pm | Reply

      If you can afford it, it’s not a bad idea. I think things from the 90s or earlier are more or less priced out of the range of normal people. You can buy some stuff that’s aged 10 years, drinkable now, but will probably be able to age a bit longer. That might be a good option.

  • PS 135F2 // October 22, 2012 at 2:31 pm | Reply

    I’m rather surprised that given all that hype for the yuanyexiang, it’s only rmb 1000 today. I’m liking it, though i wonder how different is yours from mine now that’s they’ve aged a bit more in different places on earth.

    • MarshalN // October 22, 2012 at 10:59 pm | Reply

      Well, I think that wave has passed. People who want it already have it, people who don’t…. don’t find a reason to buy it at 1000 RMB. There are a lot of alternatives at that price.

  • tst // October 22, 2012 at 4:25 pm | Reply

    “How many twenty years does one have in a lifetime?”

    I’d say in reality, maybe 2 … if you’re lucky (although storing for future generations would increase this number). So yes, you have a very good point with this post.

    Thanks for the food for thought … always like to read about puerh storage. And yes, it does strike some fear in me to consider whether or not my location is even worth attempting to store cakes in. I guess I’ll let you know after my first 20 years … 😀

  • Louis Stephenson // October 22, 2012 at 4:31 pm | Reply

    Hi Lawrence,

    I’ve been following your blog for some time and I seldom comment but I have enjoyed it immensely. I probably fit into the category of people you describe who are passionate drinkers of young sheng and have only occasionally had the opportunity to try older teas. In my case, I have had probably less than ten teas from the 70’s and 80’s and several hundred produced in the late 90’s onward. This is mostly due to the limits on what is available to me since I live in San Francisco, but also partly due to a personal preference for younger, greener sheng. Of the few older teas I have tried, I noticed a big difference in the level of complexity and the range of flavors and sensations in comparison to shu tea. That being said, I just didn’t like them as much as I like my favorite younger shengs, which I like a lot. I used to feel that since I have such a strong preference for younger teas, that I should only buy a few new cakes each spring and consume them within a year. However, through your writings you have influenced me to instead buy a lot of any tea that I especially like, as long as it’s affordable, because once something is gone you can never get it again. This puts me in the position of wanting to preserve some tea in San Francisco, which is a pretty dry and cool place. Since I do not particularly want my tea to mature and I only want to preserve the tea and prevent it from drying out and losing its flavor, potency, fragrance, etc., I have started storing all my tea in airtight mylar bags at room temperature. I have considered putting oxygen absorption packets in with the tea to forestall aging even further, but I have not yet experimented with that and I’m not sure if it’s a good idea. Given my particular storage goals, is my strategy well-adapted or am I just being a crackpot here?

    Yours,
    Louis

    • MarshalN // October 22, 2012 at 11:00 pm | Reply

      Thanks for reading. I think it sounds fine – your tea might not change all that much, but in your case, it sounds like you don’t really want it to change that much, so no harm done. Just make sure they don’t dry out and become worse over time. That does happen to some teas.

  • Hster // October 23, 2012 at 12:10 am | Reply

    Despite the dry dry Berkeley conditions, I don’t regret buying most of my 50 beengs back in 2006. The best of them are unreasonably expensive or unavailable now so I would not have been able to enjoy them and share them so casually.

    However I do regret buying most of my new beengs in 2012.

  • GN // October 23, 2012 at 9:15 am | Reply

    I’ m sure that my climate is absolutely horrible for agreeing Puerh. But I try to makes micro climate that is more suited to it. I am curious as to what your opinions are on acceptable humidity and temperature ranges to actually see cakes age.

  • Ethan K // October 23, 2012 at 12:03 pm | Reply

    Thank you. Helps me w/ decisions a lot. Excellent writing & generous sharing.

  • Nick (ImmortaliTEA) // October 23, 2012 at 12:27 pm | Reply

    Wonderful post. I’m so glad someone finally went out of their way to differentiate the two different types of puerh drinkers. I have often wondered why people only drink young teas even to the point of paying premium prices that you could get very nice aged teas for. This means that they want that particularly young, green, raw, smoky, and bitter character in their teas and once a tea ages past say 10 years they no longer enjoy the way the tea has transformed. Not trying to judge anyone, however, I feel that this somewhat goes against the idea of puerh, where to me more than half of the enjoyable experience is seeing how the complexities develop with age and seeing if you are able to re-create a famous and delicious aged tea taste using your own storage. I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that most of these drinkers most likely have only tasted very few samples of good aged teas in their lifetimes, so that in turn creates this new type of puerh afficionado, who’s main concerns are differentiating different villages and making sure they are pure and only of those villages and enjoying the powerful young Qi of these under-developed teas, but are in my opinion missing out a a huge portion of the puerh experience. Perhaps if they tasted more aged teas this trend could go the other way. Who knows. Great ideas and I am very curious if the trend will continue for a long time or not. Thanks!

    ImmortaliTEA-

  • Jim Liu // October 31, 2012 at 9:30 pm | Reply

    Lost Confidence in storing a tea? You should not. It’s so much fun to watch a tea aged into something, good or bad. Plus, you bought it for cheap.

  • Jonathan Leikam // March 1, 2013 at 6:48 pm | Reply

    I have just bought my first tong and another three for four bing and am working to build up my collection for aging. I quite enjoy old sheng and young sheng and considering the money I and many people will spend on a night on the town or a shitty pair of nikes I think dropping some cash on trying to age some cakes is an alright hobby. I do have one question though. I have some 7542 which I find very tasty but I find it lacks gan. How does one hunt for gan with the intent of aging?

    • MarshalN // March 3, 2013 at 10:27 am | Reply

      How does one hunt for gan with the intent of aging? That’s a hard question to answer without knowing more about the tea and what you might consider gan. You want gan because you think it will age well into something? Or…? What 7542 is this?

      • Jonathan Leikam // March 4, 2013 at 5:59 am | Reply

        All I know about the 7542 is that it is early 80’s. I could find more from my supplier. As far as gan I dont really know.. I’m new to being aware of the depth of character of pu erh. but I like the mouth feel that some pu erh give. Watering cheeks, sort of dry tongue with a lingering sweet taste in the back of the throat. Tight cheeks. I guess what Im wondering is when buying tea for aging will a mellow young pu erh be super mellow after aging and will a bold young pu erh keep more character? Every answer I’ve been told doesn’t really help me know what characteristics to look for.

  • Mchan // January 25, 2018 at 11:00 pm | Reply

    I’m pretty late to the party here, like 6 years late, but I’m experimenting with aging puer in a pumidor, in San Francisco, CA. My strategy now is to keep the pumidor closed at 65-70 RH and 60-70°F for the winter where heating causes the humidity where my pumidors in my house to dip into the 40s and 50sRH. In the summer, where in the past its been pretty temperant, now it gets quite hot with medium humidity (if remember correctly from this past summer, 65-70RH), at least this past summer. so I’ll open up my humidor for half the month, to let it air out and interact with the outside environment as it’s not cold or dry as winter. My hope is that this will yield somewhat of dry storage result. Only time will tell, I’ve invested in young puer and also some mid aged puer so I won’t have to wait as long, (5-10yrs) to see how those turn out at 10-15 years and so on.

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