Thursday, February 17, 2011
The Mysterious Life of Pu-Erh
During processing, tea is said to “ferment,” with different types fermenting more or less depending on the desired result. This is false, scientifically speaking. Actual fermentation requires a biological organism to be active in the tea during processing. In the tea world, when someone refers to fermentation, they most likely mean oxidation. The same process that turns old cars rusty – it is no wonder why the industry got away from the term. So they call it fermentation, for the sophistication of the sound of the word.
This all, of course, boils down to semantics. Why would it matter if an industry calls something by another name? Because, I suggest, of Pu-Erh: a magical Chinese tea, and one that actually does undergo fermentation. Calling everything fermented is like calling every type of wine a port. At a certain point it ceases to describe anything at all. And Pu-Erh is well worth describing.
Pu-Erh gets title from the region from which it originated (Pu-Erh is in the Yunnan region of China, which is located in the south-central portion of the country.) Nowadays, it refers less to a region and more to the unusual nature of the tea. Traditionally, Pu-Erh tea was cultivated, then packed and buried in the ground, where it was left to, you guessed it, ferment. This process does two things to the tea. It tends to give it a deep, extremely earthy aroma (think of a farm). It also tends to give Pu-Erh teas their smooth, wonderfully sweet finishes, without weakening the front end flavor at all.
Another oddity of Pu-Erh tea is that it is traditionally “caked.” This means that, instead of being shipped and stored as a loose pile of dried leaves, it is compressed into a cake that can be as small as a quarter, or as large as a basketball hoop. The origin behind caking is pure convenience. It was easier to ship, had a longer shelf-life, so to speak, and was easier to measure along the steppes of Asia where it was regularly traded, sometimes in the place of currency.
This all, of course, boils down to semantics. Why would it matter if an industry calls something by another name? Because, I suggest, of Pu-Erh: a magical Chinese tea, and one that actually does undergo fermentation. Calling everything fermented is like calling every type of wine a port. At a certain point it ceases to describe anything at all. And Pu-Erh is well worth describing.
Pu-Erh gets title from the region from which it originated (Pu-Erh is in the Yunnan region of China, which is located in the south-central portion of the country.) Nowadays, it refers less to a region and more to the unusual nature of the tea. Traditionally, Pu-Erh tea was cultivated, then packed and buried in the ground, where it was left to, you guessed it, ferment. This process does two things to the tea. It tends to give it a deep, extremely earthy aroma (think of a farm). It also tends to give Pu-Erh teas their smooth, wonderfully sweet finishes, without weakening the front end flavor at all.
Another oddity of Pu-Erh tea is that it is traditionally “caked.” This means that, instead of being shipped and stored as a loose pile of dried leaves, it is compressed into a cake that can be as small as a quarter, or as large as a basketball hoop. The origin behind caking is pure convenience. It was easier to ship, had a longer shelf-life, so to speak, and was easier to measure along the steppes of Asia where it was regularly traded, sometimes in the place of currency.
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