No doubt, the award for the most intriguing, most unusual and hypnotically fascinating of China’s teas must go to Pu-erh tea. This specialty of Yunnan province in southwest China has ancient roots, and the production of this tea has ( happily ) not changed much over the centuries. As a topic and area of study, pu-erh tea is to Chinese tea connoisseurs what wine is to wine connoisseurs in the West. Pu-erh is China's most high profile fermented tea and traditionally, Pu-erh is sold as a flat disc or cake of tea known as a beeng cha or as a nest-shaped tuo-cha. Pu-erh comes in two general types:

• ‘cooked’ or shou pu-erh which is an articially fermented, stable version that will not age but is  ready to drink now ( and which is also available in a few grades of leaf form )

• ‘raw’ or sheng pu-erh, is made by a natural post-fermentation process . These Pu-erh cakes will age and change and develop into something sublime over decades. The presence of live bacteria in the Pu-erh cake is responsible for these changes.

Pu-erh tea is beginning to become popular in the USA – there is a very large cadre of ‘Pu-erh heads’ in the blog-osphere who study the myriad factory marks, vintages and seasonal variation of these teas. Sheng Pu-erh is made from leaf that is plucked from  old tea trees located in the forests of Yunnan's  southern tea mountains. Aged Pu-erh  is very expensive – one should expect to pay $30.00 and up for a young sheng beeng cha that can be put aside and aged and $150.00 or more for a beeng cha that is aged six  years of more. Old beeng cha that  have been resting for thirty  years or more are priced in the thousands of dollars and enjoy an active buyers market in China, Taiwan, and Malaysia. !!