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 the only truly fermented tea that China makes ( black teas as a class are oxidized not fermented ) and traditionally, pu-erh tea is sold as a flat disc or a ‘cake’of tea. Pu-erh comes in two general types:

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

• ‘raw’ or sheng pu-erh, which will age and change and develop into something sublime over decades because of a natural, post-fermentation process that continues to affect changes within the cake

Pu-erh tea is just beginning to be available 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 from famous tea factories that is made from leaf plucked from venerable old tea trees located in the forests of important tea mountains is very expensive – one should expect to pay 30.00 for a young sheng cake and 150.00 or more for a full cake with 6 or more years of age already on it. Very old cakes that are 50 or so years old are priced in the thousands of dollars per cake and enjoy an active buyers market!!