Hello.
Welcome to Yunnan province, the home of Puerh tea.
We're on Jing Mai mountain.
We're about 1,200 meters up at the moment, and we're going to visit one of the tea plantations
- the wild forest - about 1,500 meters up at the top of Jing Mai mountain.
As you can see around me there's lots of cloud cover, lots of mist, which is exactly what
you'd expect, and want, for good Puerh tea.
So join us as we go and find some good Puerh.
So we're on Jing Mai mountain in the wild tea forest, and one of the tea producers has
just pointed out this tea tree to me.
This is a thousand-year-old tea tree.
You can see how slow-growing they are, and you can tell the age of the tree by the size
of its trunk.
So this is a thousand years old.
With Puerh tea the most important quality marker is the age of the tea tree.
The reason for that is the older the tree, the deeper, larger the roots, and the more
it can suck up from this amazing soil up here, nutrients and minerals, and it makes the tea
a more rich, vibrant brew that is full of Cha Qi - full of tea energy.
The people who are permitted to pick these ancient tea trees belong to ethnic minorities
such as Bulang and Dai tribes.
These are the ORIGINAL tea mountain people who first cultivated tea many thousands of
years ago.
It is from these people, in these forests, that tea culture spread throughout China,
and then the world.
This is the bud set - the bud and the first two leaves.
Higher quality Puerh tea usually has some bud in it.
So they'll be taking and picking here, so it will look something like this.
You've got a bud and one leaf, or a bud and two leaves - like that.
If you want to produce more tea from the bush you can also pick larger leaves.
I can show you here, if you look here, zoom into that one you can see the bud has already
turned into a leaf here.
There's no bud.
So if they pick here instead you've got THREE leaves there.
This you can also make Puerh tea, but it's going to be slightly lower quality Puerh tea.
So this is one way you can have one bush making two different types of quality of Puerh tea.
I'm on Jing Mai mountain in Yunnan province, surrounded by ancient tea trees.
These tea trees are probably around 600 to 1,200 years old.
What's important to note with Puerh tea - and how it differs from many other kinds of cultivated
teas - is that it's grown relatively wild.
Surrounding us are lots of other types of trees - fruit trees, some forest floor shrubs
as well.
All of that adds variety, complexity and flavour to the soil.
The soil is something that is really important.
The soil here is a really beautiful, fine consistency, and is like a dark chocolate
brown.
It's really, really rich.
It's probably hundreds of millions of years old.
So these old tea trees, with their long, deep roots, are pulling up all of the nutrients
from this amazing soil which is being flavoured by the variety of plants in this area.
That's what makes really good Puerh tea.
This is an example of a tea garden on the same mountain.
These tea bushes are probably about 10 to 20 years old, and their leaves will be used
to make DECENT quality - but affordable - cooked, ripened Puerh.
The tea is faster-growing with smaller roots, so the resulting brew will NOT be as rich
in minerals as the ancient trees.
The MAJORITY of cooked Puerh comes from these plantations.
After the tea is picked it is piled and left to wither for a few hours.
This begins the process of developing flavour as the leaves lose some moisture and release
volatile oils that react with the air and each other.
Then the leaves are heated in small batches.
Modern Puerh production uses large, spinning, heated drums, but this is the TRADITIONAL
way of doing things.
A wood fire is lit, and the wok is brought to about 130 degrees Celcuis before adding
the leaves.
The purpose of the heating is to slow down the oxidation process through the deactivation
of enzymes in the leaf and water reduction.
The leaves have to be moved around constantly by hand for about 30 minutes to stop them
from scorching.
It is very hard, and hot, work.
The pile of leaves waiting to be heated must be raked constantly to ensure even withering
and a consistent flavour.
After half an hour of heating the leaves are rolled to release all the tea oils for a delicious
tea.
Afterwards, the leaves are sun-dried slowly under shade before being sorted.
This is the sorting process, and this beautiful lady here is removing any of the larger leaves,
which they don't want.
This is the leaf that's left over; the leaf that they're removing from the tea.
It's all hand-sorted.
You can see she's very skilled at her job, very fast, and she'll sit for many hours here
sorting the tea.
From there the leaf will be sold to the factory who's going to make it into Puerh cakes.
If the Puerh is going to be cooked the tea master would cover piles of the dry leaves
with about 30 percent water in a hot room.
This causes tea fermentation, and can take about one to two months.
Here we are making raw cakes that can be drunk fresh or aged naturally.
We're compressing our own Puerh cakes, and I just wanted to show you if you look at these
you can see it looks like a kind of pile of leaves, but it really doesn't show the level
of detail that they've gone into to pick these leaves.
You can see, if you actually individualize them and take them out, you can see it's one
bud and one leaf, and quite a long stem.
So one bud, one leaf, and quite a long stem.
They all have the same type, so when you compress them into a cake it looks like it's a bit
of a MESS of leaves, but actually it's all very, very carefully chosen leaves.
Puerh cakes are the usual way of buying Puerh, as they are convenient for storage and aging,
although loose Puerh is becoming available.
To make the cakes they steam the leaves to soften and add moisture.
I suspect that this extra burst of moisture is one of reasons why caked aged tea is considered
to be superior to Puerh which is aged loose, as it locks in some of the moisture for fermentation.
The cake shape is moulded by hand.
I can imagine that this process is the same as it has been for THOUSANDS of years.
It is always reassuring when I witness producers doing things by hand, as I can trust that
they're not making commodity production line tea.
There are a few different shapes of Puerh cake, and this is the classic "bing" shape.
There are others, like the tuo, or "bird's nest", shape.
The cakes are given another quick steam before being compressed under heavy stones by body
weight.
We're compressing Puerh.
It's good for your exercise as well.
It helps you keep slim, if you do it every day for five, ten hours a day.
We're just tasting Puerh tea, obviously.
I just wanted to show you a few different types that we have here just to see the kind
of process we go through when selecting our teas.
This tea here is a 2014 cooked Puerh.
You can see that it's using quite large leaf.
You can see how large the leaves are here.
So that's 2014 cooked.
This is a 2014 cooked, as well.
You can see that it includes much more buds.
So this is generally considered to be a higher quality tea, and the flavour is much longer-lasting
in the mouth, so it's actually a stronger tea, looks much darker than the one before,
which is surprising because it's full of buds.
It's because there's more nutrients in the buds and younger leaves, and therefore produces
a darker tea.
This one here we're very privileged that they broke out for us to try.
This is an old RAW tea.
So this is a Lao Sheng Cha, 2003.
It's not just the age of the tea, in terms of when it's picked, that's important.
It's also the age of the tea tree, and this one is a THOUSAND years old.
So this is a thousand year old tea tree aged for 12 years, and it's delicious.
So these are some of the Puerh teas that we're tasting today.
There are whole range of different blends and ages that you can obviously try.
This is my favourite.
It's probably the most expensive.
We will find out, but I just thought I would share that with you.
So this is what all of the work is for, a cup of artisan, ancient tree, raw Puerh.
Notice the richness of nutrients floating in the brew.
It was absolutely delicious.