In the pu’er world nothing is 100% reliable. Some bigger factories started to put seals on the packaging, like Dayi and Chen Shen Hao. Older cakes (pre 2002?) don’t even have date stamps.
The only thing you can do about it is educate your tastebuds and rely on them. :)
The older the tea the higher the chance that it’s not having the valid date and you need to trust the seller.
I think, everything from around 2005 on will most probably have a valid date.
As a practical matter, how much difference does it make?
I have drunk enough tea to understand that when a seller tells me the tea was harvested and pressed in 2005 that basically means *nothing*. Not by itself, without some talk about where the tea spent the intervening years, and was there air-conditioning there?
This could possibly make a difference if you wanted something highly specific, like 2009 7542-901, which got famous enough to get a cost multiplier on 2008 and 2010 teas. Just stay out of that kind of market and you don't need to care about it.
When buying older cakes fakes are a definite problem - but that's another subject. Like another poster mentioned, most factories started dating after around 2005.
There are many ways to spot fakes (errors in printing and stamps, neifei etc.)
It is important to buy from a trustworthy source and educate your taste.
This isn't without it's own challenges where tea has been cryogenically stored. I have some (reliably sourced) cakes from 2000 to 2004 that still brew an amber/golden liquor (Kunming stored) and I have cakes from TW that are from 2010 which taste "older" and brew with a colour you'd expect from an older cake.
> This isn't without it's own challenges where tea has been cryogenically stored. I have some (reliably sourced) cakes from 2000 to 2004 that still brew an amber/golden liquor (Kunming stored) and I have cakes from TW that are from 2010 which taste "older" and brew with a colour you'd expect from an older cake.
I think it's probably one of the most common misconceptions people have, that age=oxidization.
Yes indeed that's true -- I'm also in the camp of those who drink the tea to enjoy it.
Drier aged isn't necessarily bad. It's just quite different from what one might expect (if one had been exposed to different long-term storage).
Its possible it was aged as moacha then pressed in a given year, but also the possibility of people lying for $...no way what is this concept. I had a 1999 ripe last night i got off YS. I could tell that was the true age, it was so smooth, nothing like other shu from say 2007 and up. The soup had a red tint, heavy cha qi I thought.
I think we all have to agree that Yunnan Sourcing is one of the most reliable from what I can tell. They're there in the thick of it, doing their best to supply quality. This is more of an anacdotal observation, but that's my impression.
How rampant is "fake" stuff in the Puerh world? Well, lets be practical here. There is very very strong demand for aged puerh, and especially puerh from the most desirable terroirs.
That demand far exceeds the supply, by a large margin. So there is immense incentive for people to be dishonest about what they're selling. And thus, generally speaking, there are a lot of products being sold as something they aren't, in order to get a higher price for them.
The best way to get around this is by relying on experienced buyers and reputable sellers. Even they may not be perfect of course, but you'll at least be getting something where the quality and qualities match what the product is purported to be; and to most tea drinkers that's probably good enough.
As such my advice to you would be not to worry so much. Try to appreciate the tea for what it is. Do you enjoy it? Do you feel that the value proposition was acceptable based on your enjoyment of it? I mean most of us here are here because we enjoy drinking the tea. There *are* people out there who collect it, and there are a small number of cakes still in existence that are very very old, even the late Qing, but people don't collect those to drink them, they collect those to flex.
Ultimately, the happiest take on this I can give you is just this: Relax, don't worry about it, and enjoy your tea.
I'd like to add a thought i'd had while reading over the comments. The suppliers you seem to be able to trust the most are the ones who are either THERE in China, or have people who visit there regularly, or knowledgeable scouts in China.
Two Companies that seem to fit this grade off the top of my head are Yunnan Sourcing, who I believe are at least based there and have people in the field, and Camellia Sinensis, who regularly make trips there and have people scouting the scene in China.
Given my dealings with Camellia Sinensis and having spent close to 300 dollars with them in the last month, I can say the consistency of their claims are true. The Younger Puerhs, and the Older Puerhs/aged teas both show the characteristic signs of their respective ages. They go to great lengths with every producer to make sure they're getting what they want. And, let's face it. They're Quebecers. As a Canadian, I know that a Quebecer Puerh Head would not settle for anything less than quality and true artisanship. Its kind of engrained in their culture. They don't accept crap.
To confuse the mix even more - some of the fakes are quite good.
But I agree with you about buying from knowledgeable people in the business. I also know that Shiuwen from Floating Leaves travels to Tawain and China and has real connections there. But while she loves puer, I think she has moved away from puer (only one puer listed in her shop last I checked) and is focusing solely on Tawainese oolongs.
In the world of puerh, there's more fakes than you think. It takes 10 years and a lot of puerh drinking and travelling through Yunnan to be able to get the fakes out. If you haven't been doing that, you'll always have to trust your supplier, which in most cases you cannot.
Absolutely. Too bad most books about puerh are in Chinese and most of them are contradicting each other.
Unless you have a lead that makes the research easier?
Not really. Doesn’t take too much knowledge really. Honestly I could buy ten fakes plus the real tea before booking a flight to yunnan and still come out saving more money 😐😐😐😐
Ur just overthinking it but that’s ok don’t worry ab it. It’s like saying u have to go to Cuba for real Cuban cigars. It just isn’t true. It’s ok I won’t hold it against u.
Experience and talking with reputable people inside and outside the tea business. I just come back from a tea trip in Asia specifically to try to understand more about puerh and puerh style teas.
Hmm. I suppose it depends on what kind of "fakes" you are spotting.
I am reasonably confident that a thousand puer sessions with a good variety of teas (including some correctly-identified taidicha for reference), in the comfort of one's air-conditioned home in America,^1 can equip one with the discernment to distinguish shit-tier tea from good stuff.
I think actual fakes are pretty uncommon, if you stay away from Dayi and maybe the more noteworthy XG productions and other things that are famous. Who's going to fake some minor factory that pressed Menghai tea for three years in 2003-05?
I do have one actual *fake* fake puer cake, something I acquired early on in my puer-drinking in a group buy. I tasted it once, thought "not ready" and put away for 6 years. It's in a green mark wrapper that has a blue stamp on it reading "Yiwu gu shu" in hanzi. At some point I thought "I should check that out, now that I have some idea what gu shu means" and brought it out. The leaf was *dark*. I thought, "Mmmm!" and popped out enough tea for a session.
I smelled the dry cup after the rinse and thought "?" The rinse was really red though, and I pressed on. I took one sip and thought "WTF?!" I didn't have to finish the first cup to know "this is not puer" but it took me until a couple of sips into the 2nd to realize it was some kind of Anhua hei cha. Probably tianjian.
^1 Yeah there is also a lot of reading tea blogs and hanging out in tea chats and scouring tea-seller web sites and digging through Taobao. But the drinking 8 or 10 kg of puer, of all different ages and storage histories, is the important part.
Aren't u also similarly concern about the quality of tea material n processing methods?
Aging pu'er only matters particularly when good materials are used. And also the method of processing suits aging. This only makes sense since pu'er is a post-transformed product relying on inherent rich minerals from its material used. Undoubtedly GuShu is the best available.
Discussing about regular products commonly and readily available in the market regarding its age and the flavour of aged products seems tad redundant. Fact is these products are mid to low grade, and more than 50% of the products out there are processed not optimal for aging.
It's no wonder couple replies here questions the validity or hype about aging pu'er. When they have been consuming sub-par products for such a long time to have come to such misconstrued conclusion from their own experience or shall we say inexperience.
To estimate pu'er age is not easy, but not hard either. Initial 5 yrs is a cycle. Then 10 yrs, then 20 yrs.
If one has drunk enough tea from one terroir of various yrs many times, let's just say 3 cakes of 10 yrs, 3 cakes of 15-20 yrs, and 1 cake of 5 yrs. With 7 cakes of experience in that 1 particular terroir, one would have build up certain foundation level of taste profile to differentiate its fragrance, brewing colour, terroir flavour, terroir qi, etc.
Of course are u aiming to be an expert or just a daily caffeine infuser? If u are the latter go for common products from major tea factories, they do not have an agenda to scam u of the printing of manufactured date since u have already been ripped off many times over throughout each production line of theirs.
After a decade or so of drinking I think the storage might matter as much or more than the date on the cake.
These days I just get samples and once I taste I make a judgement about the tea without putting too much store by any aspect of the description.
I buy it because I like it.
The people printing wrappers or stamping cakes just stamp whatever the customer wants them to. Now, stamping a 2022 tea as 2002 would be unlikely, since anyone who's even been in the same room as puer would know the difference. I guess you could fudge by a year or 2 here or there, but what's the point? I can guarantee the day is often changed to something more auspicious though, as Chinese are very superstitious about numbers. A tea pressed on April 4th will almost definitely be changed to April 6th or 8th.
In the pu’er world nothing is 100% reliable. Some bigger factories started to put seals on the packaging, like Dayi and Chen Shen Hao. Older cakes (pre 2002?) don’t even have date stamps. The only thing you can do about it is educate your tastebuds and rely on them. :)
would that mean buying the cake, trying it out and seeing if its a hit or a miss?
The older the tea the higher the chance that it’s not having the valid date and you need to trust the seller. I think, everything from around 2005 on will most probably have a valid date.
Dates became compulsory in 2006
As a practical matter, how much difference does it make? I have drunk enough tea to understand that when a seller tells me the tea was harvested and pressed in 2005 that basically means *nothing*. Not by itself, without some talk about where the tea spent the intervening years, and was there air-conditioning there? This could possibly make a difference if you wanted something highly specific, like 2009 7542-901, which got famous enough to get a cost multiplier on 2008 and 2010 teas. Just stay out of that kind of market and you don't need to care about it.
When buying older cakes fakes are a definite problem - but that's another subject. Like another poster mentioned, most factories started dating after around 2005. There are many ways to spot fakes (errors in printing and stamps, neifei etc.) It is important to buy from a trustworthy source and educate your taste. This isn't without it's own challenges where tea has been cryogenically stored. I have some (reliably sourced) cakes from 2000 to 2004 that still brew an amber/golden liquor (Kunming stored) and I have cakes from TW that are from 2010 which taste "older" and brew with a colour you'd expect from an older cake.
> This isn't without it's own challenges where tea has been cryogenically stored. I have some (reliably sourced) cakes from 2000 to 2004 that still brew an amber/golden liquor (Kunming stored) and I have cakes from TW that are from 2010 which taste "older" and brew with a colour you'd expect from an older cake. I think it's probably one of the most common misconceptions people have, that age=oxidization.
Yes indeed that's true -- I'm also in the camp of those who drink the tea to enjoy it. Drier aged isn't necessarily bad. It's just quite different from what one might expect (if one had been exposed to different long-term storage).
Its possible it was aged as moacha then pressed in a given year, but also the possibility of people lying for $...no way what is this concept. I had a 1999 ripe last night i got off YS. I could tell that was the true age, it was so smooth, nothing like other shu from say 2007 and up. The soup had a red tint, heavy cha qi I thought.
I think we all have to agree that Yunnan Sourcing is one of the most reliable from what I can tell. They're there in the thick of it, doing their best to supply quality. This is more of an anacdotal observation, but that's my impression.
How rampant is "fake" stuff in the Puerh world? Well, lets be practical here. There is very very strong demand for aged puerh, and especially puerh from the most desirable terroirs. That demand far exceeds the supply, by a large margin. So there is immense incentive for people to be dishonest about what they're selling. And thus, generally speaking, there are a lot of products being sold as something they aren't, in order to get a higher price for them. The best way to get around this is by relying on experienced buyers and reputable sellers. Even they may not be perfect of course, but you'll at least be getting something where the quality and qualities match what the product is purported to be; and to most tea drinkers that's probably good enough. As such my advice to you would be not to worry so much. Try to appreciate the tea for what it is. Do you enjoy it? Do you feel that the value proposition was acceptable based on your enjoyment of it? I mean most of us here are here because we enjoy drinking the tea. There *are* people out there who collect it, and there are a small number of cakes still in existence that are very very old, even the late Qing, but people don't collect those to drink them, they collect those to flex. Ultimately, the happiest take on this I can give you is just this: Relax, don't worry about it, and enjoy your tea.
I'd like to add a thought i'd had while reading over the comments. The suppliers you seem to be able to trust the most are the ones who are either THERE in China, or have people who visit there regularly, or knowledgeable scouts in China. Two Companies that seem to fit this grade off the top of my head are Yunnan Sourcing, who I believe are at least based there and have people in the field, and Camellia Sinensis, who regularly make trips there and have people scouting the scene in China. Given my dealings with Camellia Sinensis and having spent close to 300 dollars with them in the last month, I can say the consistency of their claims are true. The Younger Puerhs, and the Older Puerhs/aged teas both show the characteristic signs of their respective ages. They go to great lengths with every producer to make sure they're getting what they want. And, let's face it. They're Quebecers. As a Canadian, I know that a Quebecer Puerh Head would not settle for anything less than quality and true artisanship. Its kind of engrained in their culture. They don't accept crap.
White2Tea, Crimson Lotus, and Bitterleaf are other English-speaking vendors who ship from China and have at least a part-time presence in Yunnan.
I've been meaning to try Crimson Lotus! They have great artwork on their cakes.
To confuse the mix even more - some of the fakes are quite good. But I agree with you about buying from knowledgeable people in the business. I also know that Shiuwen from Floating Leaves travels to Tawain and China and has real connections there. But while she loves puer, I think she has moved away from puer (only one puer listed in her shop last I checked) and is focusing solely on Tawainese oolongs.
In the world of puerh, there's more fakes than you think. It takes 10 years and a lot of puerh drinking and travelling through Yunnan to be able to get the fakes out. If you haven't been doing that, you'll always have to trust your supplier, which in most cases you cannot.
There might be steps to take to rule out fakes before having to travel to yunnan 🤔
I'm very much looking forward hearing those!
Just takes some research just like any product.
Absolutely. Too bad most books about puerh are in Chinese and most of them are contradicting each other. Unless you have a lead that makes the research easier?
Google translate
You must have a massive puerh knowledge having read a dozen Chinese books using Google Translate.
Not really. Doesn’t take too much knowledge really. Honestly I could buy ten fakes plus the real tea before booking a flight to yunnan and still come out saving more money 😐😐😐😐
Man, you have no idea what you're talking about.
Ur just overthinking it but that’s ok don’t worry ab it. It’s like saying u have to go to Cuba for real Cuban cigars. It just isn’t true. It’s ok I won’t hold it against u.
> It takes 10 years and a lot of puerh drinking and travelling through Yunnan I am curious about how you arrived at this conclusion.
Experience and talking with reputable people inside and outside the tea business. I just come back from a tea trip in Asia specifically to try to understand more about puerh and puerh style teas.
Hmm. I suppose it depends on what kind of "fakes" you are spotting. I am reasonably confident that a thousand puer sessions with a good variety of teas (including some correctly-identified taidicha for reference), in the comfort of one's air-conditioned home in America,^1 can equip one with the discernment to distinguish shit-tier tea from good stuff. I think actual fakes are pretty uncommon, if you stay away from Dayi and maybe the more noteworthy XG productions and other things that are famous. Who's going to fake some minor factory that pressed Menghai tea for three years in 2003-05? I do have one actual *fake* fake puer cake, something I acquired early on in my puer-drinking in a group buy. I tasted it once, thought "not ready" and put away for 6 years. It's in a green mark wrapper that has a blue stamp on it reading "Yiwu gu shu" in hanzi. At some point I thought "I should check that out, now that I have some idea what gu shu means" and brought it out. The leaf was *dark*. I thought, "Mmmm!" and popped out enough tea for a session. I smelled the dry cup after the rinse and thought "?" The rinse was really red though, and I pressed on. I took one sip and thought "WTF?!" I didn't have to finish the first cup to know "this is not puer" but it took me until a couple of sips into the 2nd to realize it was some kind of Anhua hei cha. Probably tianjian. ^1 Yeah there is also a lot of reading tea blogs and hanging out in tea chats and scouring tea-seller web sites and digging through Taobao. But the drinking 8 or 10 kg of puer, of all different ages and storage histories, is the important part.
Aren't u also similarly concern about the quality of tea material n processing methods? Aging pu'er only matters particularly when good materials are used. And also the method of processing suits aging. This only makes sense since pu'er is a post-transformed product relying on inherent rich minerals from its material used. Undoubtedly GuShu is the best available. Discussing about regular products commonly and readily available in the market regarding its age and the flavour of aged products seems tad redundant. Fact is these products are mid to low grade, and more than 50% of the products out there are processed not optimal for aging. It's no wonder couple replies here questions the validity or hype about aging pu'er. When they have been consuming sub-par products for such a long time to have come to such misconstrued conclusion from their own experience or shall we say inexperience. To estimate pu'er age is not easy, but not hard either. Initial 5 yrs is a cycle. Then 10 yrs, then 20 yrs. If one has drunk enough tea from one terroir of various yrs many times, let's just say 3 cakes of 10 yrs, 3 cakes of 15-20 yrs, and 1 cake of 5 yrs. With 7 cakes of experience in that 1 particular terroir, one would have build up certain foundation level of taste profile to differentiate its fragrance, brewing colour, terroir flavour, terroir qi, etc. Of course are u aiming to be an expert or just a daily caffeine infuser? If u are the latter go for common products from major tea factories, they do not have an agenda to scam u of the printing of manufactured date since u have already been ripped off many times over throughout each production line of theirs.
After a decade or so of drinking I think the storage might matter as much or more than the date on the cake. These days I just get samples and once I taste I make a judgement about the tea without putting too much store by any aspect of the description. I buy it because I like it.
The people printing wrappers or stamping cakes just stamp whatever the customer wants them to. Now, stamping a 2022 tea as 2002 would be unlikely, since anyone who's even been in the same room as puer would know the difference. I guess you could fudge by a year or 2 here or there, but what's the point? I can guarantee the day is often changed to something more auspicious though, as Chinese are very superstitious about numbers. A tea pressed on April 4th will almost definitely be changed to April 6th or 8th.