A Tea Addict's Journal

The dangers of dry and cold

March 28, 2014 · 7 Comments

Well, regular readers know that I’m skeptical of storage conditions that are too dry or too cold. The combination of these two things is generally not good news for puerh tea. It makes for bad tea.

I recently bought a few cakes through Taobao from a vendor in Tianjin. I’ve bought from them before, years ago. Their tea is not that bad. These teas I got are not bad tea per se, but the storage on them has made them pretty poor. Specifically, the cakes (all different) all share a slightly sour, thin, and unpleasant note. Two of the teas are themselves very decent originally – the base tea still shines through, a bit, but without any of the thickness and richness you’d hope to see from teas that are 7-10 years old. Instead, they are just…. sour and a bit bland. If I have teas that old that taste like this, I’d be disappointed.

One of the cakes is a nice Yiwu that I know didn’t taste like that when first made, because I tried it way back when it first came out. I never bought any, because it was out of my budget at the time living on grad student stipend. I wish I had some, and was hoping that this cake would be ok, but it’s not – not in this condition.

Tianjin is typical north China – cold, not too damp, although probably damper than some of the more inland places like Beijing. This is why I normally don’t like to buy teas that are stored in any of these drier climates – they taste bad. The damage in taste is also not obvious when you’re buying online – the cakes, even when held in person, look perfectly fine. There’s no really obvious sign that something is awry, until you put it in water and try it.

This is not to say the tea hasn’t changed – it has. The colour has changed, the taste is also not what you’d see when it’s new. But as a tea that is getting better with age? No, not really. Just because a tea changes over time doesn’t mean it’s changing for the better over time, and a lot of people in these areas have never had a good tasting 10 year old to compare against, so it’s not obvious to them what’s wrong with teas like this.

Now the next question is whether some wet weather storage in Hong Kong can salvage the tea. I’ll let you know in a few years.

Categories: Teas
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7 responses so far ↓

  • Darius Wilkins // March 28, 2014 at 11:10 am | Reply

    How well processed do you think this tea was, originally?

    • MarshalN // March 28, 2014 at 8:29 pm | Reply

      Reasonably well. Even now the tea doesn’t taste “off” that way. I bought a Yiwu, a Mengku, and two Menghai area teas, from different makes. I can taste the regional differences, but they all share the “sour and thin” characteristics. It’s the storage.

      • Darius Wilkins // March 29, 2014 at 2:03 am | Reply

        For me, it’s just that it’s hard to grasp the sourness that you mean. A lot of things that I’ve had that I know have been spent in Taiwan has a few early sour-ish brews. A number of tea areas has some degree of natural sour notes…etc, etc. Some teas have stopped getting thinner in taste and started developing more, in fits and starts when it gets older. Though, I think I’d have to say that if it’s too thin for you at eight years, then it will always be too thin, or at least until more of the leaf breaks down.

  • Aisha // April 1, 2014 at 9:20 pm | Reply

    What kind of tea do you recommend? What are your absolute favorites❓

  • PuPuPlatter // February 5, 2022 at 10:10 pm | Reply

    Was there ever a follow up post on the salvage?

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