Aged & Fermented · Dark Tea
Pu'er (普洱) Tea
Photo: wanghongliu / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0
Unlike most teas, Pu'er improves with age — compressed cakes of it are traded and collected like fine wine, some decades old.
Pu'er is a Yunnan tea made from large-leaf tea plants, often pressed into cakes and bricks, in two styles: raw (sheng), which ages slowly, and ripe (shou), which is pile-fermented to darken it quickly. It is sold by the cake in tea markets and brewed strong in short, rapid infusions in small pots or gaiwans at teahouses across the province.
Why it's made this way: Yunnan's unique microclimate and centuries-old tea-horse road trade routes made it the birthplace of a tea style found nowhere else.
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