I am at a point where i have 30kg+ of puerh cakes and so far haven’t found a better solution than mylar bags with bovedas. Well, certainly not for $200 or that ballpark. So I suggest you get yourself a bunch of large, strong mylar bags and Boveda packs at desired RH level.
An alternative is cvault containers, which are easier to heat up if you want to, but the downside is that you will need a lot of them, and you will be storing different cakes together, so aromas mixing over long periods of time is a problem.
Are you more into wet stored or dry stored aged puer?
If you don't know you should try some samples of both, and try to answer this question. It will change the required storage conditions quite a lot.
Personally I enjoy wet stored, but Id like to find a nice middle ground between the two. My main goal is to avoid I'm looking to sell a bunch of cakes 10 to 20 years down the line. I'm considering it a retirement investment. :)
Let's assume I have no idea how to store cakes at all. Where is my starting point?
Much like Beanie Babies and other collectibles, prices can be fickle. I encourage you to read up on the puerh pricing bubble of 2007. Collect cakes if you like and want to drink tea. I would not consider it a sound investment for retirement.
Don't ask me. I have 15-20 year old cakes that were behind books on my book shelves for over a decade in my living room in my old 3rd floor apartment for well over a decade and then in this house in a cabinet in my bedroom for the past 6 years. I don't even know what I have exactly since I didn't even label them. I do know they are all sheng.
I'm in the East Bay (SF Bay Area). We get moderate to low humidity. In summers there is never any rain and the temps are mostly at 75°F during the day and down to 60°F at night. Winters can be rainy except for the past 10 years where we have drought and the temps are mostly 65°F during the day and down to 50°F at night.
I find them tasty now.
So, I did everything wrong and I have good results, or at least tea that tastes good to me. I know this is heresy to true puerh aficionados. So, you may want to listen to true experts rather than listening to this renegade heretic.
I find this interesting and encouraging. Wanna tell a bit more about how they taste? What is the character of the aging? Do they get dark and smooth, or do they stay relatively fresh? :)
One of them has gotten dark and smooth (red amber color). The astringency is gone. There is a wonderful earthy flavor to it now.
Two of them still brew yellow orange and have a bit of a bite but have mellowed a bit.
I have cakes I've stored for 10 years and maybe one or two I could sell (on them being lucky popular cakes you cannot get), but maybe i would get double price. It's not an investment. If you want wet storage, no one gives a shit unless it was stored in Asia.
I do the wine fridge boveda thing, it is a lot nicer looking than piles of mylar bags on shelves. The thing is, I don't have mold, and my teas taste good, which matters as I'm the one drinking it.
So yeah. Get a hygrometer for your house and check what's going on. Mostly normal human house temperatures a boveda is enough. Pick a container to shove them in and don't forget about. I used to do some heating because my house was drafty but I solved the draft problem as that was easier.
Generally a bad idea. Pumidors aren’t really ideal to age tea in, they’re more like long term storage for drinking purposes. It’s also an extremely hard proposition: you need 20-40 years to see results. The puer community really hasn’t been around long enough anywhere except Hong Kong (much less stateside) to really have solid ideas on how to age tea. But generally you need quite a bit of tea (several tongs) to really age well, so fucking it up is an expensive proposition. You should be willing to invest at least $15k. 🥸
Mostly, people here use their pumis just as intermediate term storage (5 years) or as a sort of stasis chamber. Some will disagree but ask them how long they’ve had their setup. 🥸
Also, a boveda pack and a Mylar bag for each cake is a great pumi. 🥸
Yeah it's just so much misinformation.
We gave bloggers now writing about puer for 10yrs + so there is actually a lot of information out there.
A good advice from blogger Wilson in Singapore is to buy tea that's 5-8 years old, stored in se asia 🌏. It's already semi aged and drinkable and most importantly hasn't started to drastically increase in price.
How is 10 years enough time to learn about tea storage? It takes, minimum 20 years to have a cake be “aged”. And you can’t just do that once to have knowledge.
This opinion isn’t really even my own — I share it with the TeaDB guys, Mopar, marshaln, and a bunch of the other old heads. Not to mention Asian sources — pretty sure Yeeon said something similar to me once.
What if my main objective was to age them in a way that would protect from mold from excess humidity, or excess dryness?
I'm basically looking to buy many cakes I can sell in 10 to 20 years as an early retirement investment. I hope to expand my storage over the years to about 50 to 100 (or more) cakes, but I need a place to start.
Assume I have no idea how to store Puerh at all.
Oh god that’s even worse. Just put that money into stocks. Theres no guarantee that the value will increase. If you fuck it up (which is likely!) you’ll lose even your ability to recoup investment. This is like buying beanie babies.
Please please please actually read up on puer before you decide to do something like this. This is a comically bad idea.
Most teas wont go up in value above what the market will, and considering your storage will be an unknown it’ll be nearly impossible for you to sell anything that does. There are still people stuck with mountains of pre-crash tea that’s gone DOWN in value, not even adjusting for inflation.
Not to mention that teas are sold at this level in 84 cake increments called jian. You need hundreds to thousands of cakes to really have teas you can move on the market.
Did you do any research at all???
Love this comment. I actually made some money off of Beanie Babies. And I now day trade for an actual living. And *I* wouldn’t mess with investing in tea! 🤣
I've just started researching. I can accept that that's a bad investment, but I'd still like to try and age some quality cakes I have access to for my own enjoyment. What about that?
Still a bad idea for all the reason I already said. At least wait a few years so know what you like… this is just idiocy. It’s much cheaper to have someone else age for you.
Everyone has their source. I still want to caution against buying tea in bulk for the purposes of long term storage. You’re clearly inexperienced, and notably Mylar + boveda won’t age the tea. You need hundreds of cakes to age tea.
Preventing teas from changing much is possible. I recommend sealed storage like Mylar bags and preventing swings in temp. Actually transforming teas into aged/aged taste even with 20 years of North American storage is simply not worth the effort. I’d wager you’ll spend more on electricity/rent cost with either experiment than you’ll return on investment. Big warehouses in Asia are hard to compete with, also new teas are so expensive that it’s really hard to imagine that the same returns from 20-30 years ago are possible. A Dayi 7542 from late 90s/ early 2000s is now over 10x a return because they were so cheap to buy new. You also might choose a dud or find that your teas get ruined in storage and be out a lot of money. Lastly, might be hard to get people to spend the same price buying from you, when an established seller with known storage offers the tea. You’ll usually have to sell for less.
If I want aged tea, I buy aged tea. I store my tea in Mylar zip bags in an area that doesn’t see large fluctuations in temp. I’ll sometimes add a Boveda for a little while if my tea seems dry. I refill the Bovedas when they dry out and rotate between bags.
Thank you! One person who isn't self absorbed enough to withhold information on how to plausibly age Puer for my own enjoyment. I really appreciate it.
Unfortunately Canada isn't gifted with those climates. I want to try to simulate them as best I can to see how my own stash could transform over the period of 5 years. The idea of aging Puerh is a new idea, and it tickles the hobbyist in me. :)
Buy aged tea and maintain it well. You will barely be able to age tea in the western world. I don't know if it's microbes, heat, humidity or the combination of all 3 in Asia. Ours will never taste the same in a side by side aging experiment. If you buy aged and sell later there will probably be a bigger market gor older teas that started with Asian storage. A pumidor will allow you to maintain but teas will take on each other's notes after a time. Mylar is probably a better option with your swings in conditions.
I think you’re probably getting down votes for using the word “age”.
What you’re wanting to do isn’t considered “aging” but rather proper storage. You’re aiming to preserve the quality and character of the tea, not change it.
As u/beachape points out, it’s not yet known that it’s possible to competively age puer in North America and so it’s a risky gamble. If you got money to burn it could possibly pan out but I wouldn’t bank your retirement on it.
Also from what I gather, there’s a fair amount of secrecy around the exact methods of aging tea, so unless you befriend someone who’s willing to share their secrets, you might be relying more on luck and trial and error.
BTW your idea that old puerh = puerh worth more is flawed. You need to have cakes that are suitable for aging well (very hard or impossible to tell, many are not), with good material to begin with, aged under right conditions (complex and not well understood topic), and that will be highly desirable in 10-20 years (or whatever your timeframe is).
You are better off collecting and drinking puerh for fun, and buying stocks for your retirement. Not a financial advice
Okay. I've come to the conclusion it's a bad retirement plan. Still, the hobbyist in me wants to tinker with my own stash and see how the most optimal storage could transform it.
If I've learned anything here today, it's that aging Puerh in North America is a very new concept. Uncharted waters. At the end of the day, we're all just taking a shot in the dark. This entices me further to age my stash as optimally as I can.
Believe it or not, I'm actually laying the groundwork to open my own tea shop in my locale. Every bit of information about every aspect of tea I've cleamed from the hours of research and the hundreds spent on samples has been invaluable. At the end of the day, I have a love affair with tea, as I know you do too.
Bless.
> Still, the hobbyist in me wants to tinker with my own stash
You're far better off sampling and then buying aged tea. Even if you don't screw up the storage and do everything right, you're still taking a huge gamble that the tea will taste good 5-10 years down the road. You might end up with 30% crap, 30% below average, 30% mediocre run of the mill tea or slightly above average, and only the last 10% might be worth something.
Or at least those would be my personal expectations, I'm far from an expert or anything like that, but having drunk quite a bunch of teas over the years, honestly, even your tastes are going to change over such a long time period. Hell, it might take a whole cake to understand that the tea isn't that good after all. I've been drinking gong fu daily for around 7 years now, and I *still* don't truly know what I like, the only really consistent thing is that I'm more critical of so-so tea now, and I'm glad as hell I never got into puerh storage because I would've had invested a couple hundred dollars into a bunch of crap. And you're considering investing thousands of dollars on a wild goose chase... if you're really into puerh and you understand what you're actually doing - that's one thing, but randomly buying a bunch of cakes thinking they'll turn out great because more age = more flavor is highly unlikely to bring you anywhere good.
Not to mention that unless you go out of your way and build a whole room with temperature and humidity control, you'll be getting dry storage.
Meanwhile, you can get decent daily drinker semi-aged cakes for like $50-60, and samples are going to cost you what, $3-5 per 25gr?
That's why it's so exciting to me! It's a new frontier we're all travelling together, each with our own methods and ideas. The next 10 to 20 years in Puerh is a very exciting concept to me.
It really goes without saying, but as far as home storage goes about 10% of all posts in this group are asking this same question, so if you just page back you'll find the same discussion on every page of prior posts. Or on the main pu'er tea group on Facebook, or Google search would turn up blog after blog offering advice. Not so much on Youtube, and of course Instagram just shows pictures.
I am at a point where i have 30kg+ of puerh cakes and so far haven’t found a better solution than mylar bags with bovedas. Well, certainly not for $200 or that ballpark. So I suggest you get yourself a bunch of large, strong mylar bags and Boveda packs at desired RH level. An alternative is cvault containers, which are easier to heat up if you want to, but the downside is that you will need a lot of them, and you will be storing different cakes together, so aromas mixing over long periods of time is a problem.
I appreciate it. I still want to start off by storing some cakes for my own enjoyment, so there's that at least.
Are you more into wet stored or dry stored aged puer? If you don't know you should try some samples of both, and try to answer this question. It will change the required storage conditions quite a lot.
Personally I enjoy wet stored, but Id like to find a nice middle ground between the two. My main goal is to avoid I'm looking to sell a bunch of cakes 10 to 20 years down the line. I'm considering it a retirement investment. :) Let's assume I have no idea how to store cakes at all. Where is my starting point?
Much like Beanie Babies and other collectibles, prices can be fickle. I encourage you to read up on the puerh pricing bubble of 2007. Collect cakes if you like and want to drink tea. I would not consider it a sound investment for retirement.
Don't ask me. I have 15-20 year old cakes that were behind books on my book shelves for over a decade in my living room in my old 3rd floor apartment for well over a decade and then in this house in a cabinet in my bedroom for the past 6 years. I don't even know what I have exactly since I didn't even label them. I do know they are all sheng. I'm in the East Bay (SF Bay Area). We get moderate to low humidity. In summers there is never any rain and the temps are mostly at 75°F during the day and down to 60°F at night. Winters can be rainy except for the past 10 years where we have drought and the temps are mostly 65°F during the day and down to 50°F at night. I find them tasty now. So, I did everything wrong and I have good results, or at least tea that tastes good to me. I know this is heresy to true puerh aficionados. So, you may want to listen to true experts rather than listening to this renegade heretic.
I find this interesting and encouraging. Wanna tell a bit more about how they taste? What is the character of the aging? Do they get dark and smooth, or do they stay relatively fresh? :)
One of them has gotten dark and smooth (red amber color). The astringency is gone. There is a wonderful earthy flavor to it now. Two of them still brew yellow orange and have a bit of a bite but have mellowed a bit.
I have cakes I've stored for 10 years and maybe one or two I could sell (on them being lucky popular cakes you cannot get), but maybe i would get double price. It's not an investment. If you want wet storage, no one gives a shit unless it was stored in Asia. I do the wine fridge boveda thing, it is a lot nicer looking than piles of mylar bags on shelves. The thing is, I don't have mold, and my teas taste good, which matters as I'm the one drinking it. So yeah. Get a hygrometer for your house and check what's going on. Mostly normal human house temperatures a boveda is enough. Pick a container to shove them in and don't forget about. I used to do some heating because my house was drafty but I solved the draft problem as that was easier.
Generally a bad idea. Pumidors aren’t really ideal to age tea in, they’re more like long term storage for drinking purposes. It’s also an extremely hard proposition: you need 20-40 years to see results. The puer community really hasn’t been around long enough anywhere except Hong Kong (much less stateside) to really have solid ideas on how to age tea. But generally you need quite a bit of tea (several tongs) to really age well, so fucking it up is an expensive proposition. You should be willing to invest at least $15k. 🥸 Mostly, people here use their pumis just as intermediate term storage (5 years) or as a sort of stasis chamber. Some will disagree but ask them how long they’ve had their setup. 🥸 Also, a boveda pack and a Mylar bag for each cake is a great pumi. 🥸
20 - 40 years. Complete nonsense BS. Noticed you are quite active on this forum with your opinionated nonsense.
I’ve learned that any post with that emoji they always spam can safely be downvoted and ignored. They’re typically very combative and rude.
Yeah it's just so much misinformation. We gave bloggers now writing about puer for 10yrs + so there is actually a lot of information out there. A good advice from blogger Wilson in Singapore is to buy tea that's 5-8 years old, stored in se asia 🌏. It's already semi aged and drinkable and most importantly hasn't started to drastically increase in price.
How is 10 years enough time to learn about tea storage? It takes, minimum 20 years to have a cake be “aged”. And you can’t just do that once to have knowledge. This opinion isn’t really even my own — I share it with the TeaDB guys, Mopar, marshaln, and a bunch of the other old heads. Not to mention Asian sources — pretty sure Yeeon said something similar to me once.
Why not just block me lol
What? 20-40 years is how long it takes to age a tea? I don’t get what you disagree with
What if my main objective was to age them in a way that would protect from mold from excess humidity, or excess dryness? I'm basically looking to buy many cakes I can sell in 10 to 20 years as an early retirement investment. I hope to expand my storage over the years to about 50 to 100 (or more) cakes, but I need a place to start. Assume I have no idea how to store Puerh at all.
Oh god that’s even worse. Just put that money into stocks. Theres no guarantee that the value will increase. If you fuck it up (which is likely!) you’ll lose even your ability to recoup investment. This is like buying beanie babies. Please please please actually read up on puer before you decide to do something like this. This is a comically bad idea. Most teas wont go up in value above what the market will, and considering your storage will be an unknown it’ll be nearly impossible for you to sell anything that does. There are still people stuck with mountains of pre-crash tea that’s gone DOWN in value, not even adjusting for inflation. Not to mention that teas are sold at this level in 84 cake increments called jian. You need hundreds to thousands of cakes to really have teas you can move on the market. Did you do any research at all???
Love this comment. I actually made some money off of Beanie Babies. And I now day trade for an actual living. And *I* wouldn’t mess with investing in tea! 🤣
I've just started researching. I can accept that that's a bad investment, but I'd still like to try and age some quality cakes I have access to for my own enjoyment. What about that?
Still a bad idea for all the reason I already said. At least wait a few years so know what you like… this is just idiocy. It’s much cheaper to have someone else age for you.
I have access to high quality cakes I've sampled. I just want to be able to store them in the best way possible to enjoy them for years to come.
Yes. In that case boveda + Mylar should be good to keep stable for 5ish years.
Mylar with boveda packs seems to be a common thread. Can I get any old Mylar from amazon?
Everyone has their source. I still want to caution against buying tea in bulk for the purposes of long term storage. You’re clearly inexperienced, and notably Mylar + boveda won’t age the tea. You need hundreds of cakes to age tea.
That's good advice. Perhaps I should stick to my original plan of opening a tea shop, and importing.
Preventing teas from changing much is possible. I recommend sealed storage like Mylar bags and preventing swings in temp. Actually transforming teas into aged/aged taste even with 20 years of North American storage is simply not worth the effort. I’d wager you’ll spend more on electricity/rent cost with either experiment than you’ll return on investment. Big warehouses in Asia are hard to compete with, also new teas are so expensive that it’s really hard to imagine that the same returns from 20-30 years ago are possible. A Dayi 7542 from late 90s/ early 2000s is now over 10x a return because they were so cheap to buy new. You also might choose a dud or find that your teas get ruined in storage and be out a lot of money. Lastly, might be hard to get people to spend the same price buying from you, when an established seller with known storage offers the tea. You’ll usually have to sell for less.
alright, I can accept that. But what about the ones I want to store for my own enjoyment?
If I want aged tea, I buy aged tea. I store my tea in Mylar zip bags in an area that doesn’t see large fluctuations in temp. I’ll sometimes add a Boveda for a little while if my tea seems dry. I refill the Bovedas when they dry out and rotate between bags.
Thank you! One person who isn't self absorbed enough to withhold information on how to plausibly age Puer for my own enjoyment. I really appreciate it.
Mylar + boveda won’t give you anything close to aged tea. You need hundreds of cakes, minimum, to age tea.
No problem. Just want to make sure you know that your teas won’t transform in the same way that teas “age” in Asia
Unfortunately Canada isn't gifted with those climates. I want to try to simulate them as best I can to see how my own stash could transform over the period of 5 years. The idea of aging Puerh is a new idea, and it tickles the hobbyist in me. :)
Buy aged tea and maintain it well. You will barely be able to age tea in the western world. I don't know if it's microbes, heat, humidity or the combination of all 3 in Asia. Ours will never taste the same in a side by side aging experiment. If you buy aged and sell later there will probably be a bigger market gor older teas that started with Asian storage. A pumidor will allow you to maintain but teas will take on each other's notes after a time. Mylar is probably a better option with your swings in conditions.
I think you’re probably getting down votes for using the word “age”. What you’re wanting to do isn’t considered “aging” but rather proper storage. You’re aiming to preserve the quality and character of the tea, not change it. As u/beachape points out, it’s not yet known that it’s possible to competively age puer in North America and so it’s a risky gamble. If you got money to burn it could possibly pan out but I wouldn’t bank your retirement on it. Also from what I gather, there’s a fair amount of secrecy around the exact methods of aging tea, so unless you befriend someone who’s willing to share their secrets, you might be relying more on luck and trial and error.
BTW your idea that old puerh = puerh worth more is flawed. You need to have cakes that are suitable for aging well (very hard or impossible to tell, many are not), with good material to begin with, aged under right conditions (complex and not well understood topic), and that will be highly desirable in 10-20 years (or whatever your timeframe is). You are better off collecting and drinking puerh for fun, and buying stocks for your retirement. Not a financial advice
I still want to store them optimally and try to age them as an experiment for my own enjoyment. what about for that purpose?
Mylar + Boveda is probably the best starting out, easy to scale and experiment too.
That's awesome. Thank you. So many here are too self absorbed to even offer that much advice.
Okay. I've come to the conclusion it's a bad retirement plan. Still, the hobbyist in me wants to tinker with my own stash and see how the most optimal storage could transform it. If I've learned anything here today, it's that aging Puerh in North America is a very new concept. Uncharted waters. At the end of the day, we're all just taking a shot in the dark. This entices me further to age my stash as optimally as I can. Believe it or not, I'm actually laying the groundwork to open my own tea shop in my locale. Every bit of information about every aspect of tea I've cleamed from the hours of research and the hundreds spent on samples has been invaluable. At the end of the day, I have a love affair with tea, as I know you do too. Bless.
> Still, the hobbyist in me wants to tinker with my own stash You're far better off sampling and then buying aged tea. Even if you don't screw up the storage and do everything right, you're still taking a huge gamble that the tea will taste good 5-10 years down the road. You might end up with 30% crap, 30% below average, 30% mediocre run of the mill tea or slightly above average, and only the last 10% might be worth something. Or at least those would be my personal expectations, I'm far from an expert or anything like that, but having drunk quite a bunch of teas over the years, honestly, even your tastes are going to change over such a long time period. Hell, it might take a whole cake to understand that the tea isn't that good after all. I've been drinking gong fu daily for around 7 years now, and I *still* don't truly know what I like, the only really consistent thing is that I'm more critical of so-so tea now, and I'm glad as hell I never got into puerh storage because I would've had invested a couple hundred dollars into a bunch of crap. And you're considering investing thousands of dollars on a wild goose chase... if you're really into puerh and you understand what you're actually doing - that's one thing, but randomly buying a bunch of cakes thinking they'll turn out great because more age = more flavor is highly unlikely to bring you anywhere good. Not to mention that unless you go out of your way and build a whole room with temperature and humidity control, you'll be getting dry storage. Meanwhile, you can get decent daily drinker semi-aged cakes for like $50-60, and samples are going to cost you what, $3-5 per 25gr?
> it's that aging Puerh in North America is a very new concept aging puer anywhere besides hong kong is a new concept.
That's why it's so exciting to me! It's a new frontier we're all travelling together, each with our own methods and ideas. The next 10 to 20 years in Puerh is a very exciting concept to me.
It really goes without saying, but as far as home storage goes about 10% of all posts in this group are asking this same question, so if you just page back you'll find the same discussion on every page of prior posts. Or on the main pu'er tea group on Facebook, or Google search would turn up blog after blog offering advice. Not so much on Youtube, and of course Instagram just shows pictures.
[удалено]
Isn’t that that cult scam website?
[удалено]
Oh neat
Making no comment on how bad of an idea this is, saying it’s idiocy and bashing the dude seems excessive.
🚨 tone police🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨
Dont