Things You Need to Know Before Starting Your Pu-erh Collection

With Pu-erh gaining mainstream attention outside of Chinese community, many western tea drinkers start to love this mysterious tea. The high prices that some well aged Pu-erh demand and the hyper about collecting Pu-erh as an investment have pumped many western Pu-erh drinkers into collecting Pu-erh. However, before you spend your hard earned money on this investment, you need to know more about Pu-erh. Simply put, not all Pu-erh that produced nowadays are worth collecting.

First of all, those famous Pu-erh factories are no longer your quality assurance. A good example is Meng Hai Tea Factory’s 2004 production. The company was struggled with funding problem and could not afford good raw materials. As a result of that, most of the company’s 2004 productions were of poor quality. Many Pu-erh collectors shunned away from those products.

Secondly, vast amount of faked brand name products can even deceive professionals’ eyes. In a recent online discussion on Xia Guan Te Ji Tuo Cha, many people voted the faked one as the real one! That is a very disturbing fact! Without carefully examing, can you tell the differences between the real and faked ones from pictures from two Xia Guan Te Ji Tuo Cha wraps?

Thirdly, with many new tea factories evolving now, factories are introducing many untraditional Pu-erh to the market as an answer to the severe competitions. Unfortunately, some of those newly introduced Pu-erh have started to show that they can not stand the test of time. One good example is the young green Pu-erh that is made of only tea buds. This type of Pu-erh can not last long time aging. Therefore, is not suitable for collection.

When making Pu-erh collection decisions, tea leave quality should be your first consideration, followed by recipe and production techniques.