Pu'er's aromas range from the floral and honey notes of young raw tea, to the aged and woody notes of old tea, to the jujube and glutinous-rice notes of ripe tea. Learn to smell in three stages and to tell lid aroma, cup aroma, and liquor aroma apart, and you can describe a tea's aroma type, intensity, and persistence.
Liquor color is the most intuitive evaluation factor: raw tea moves from yellow-green and golden toward orange-yellow and amber, while ripe tea's depth of red indicates how heavily it was fermented. Whether it's bright and clear often tells you more about a tea's condition than how dark it is.
The keys to storing pu'er are keeping it dry, ventilated, out of the light, and away from odors. Taiwan is humid, so how should you store it, where, and should you seal it? Storage advice for everyday households.
The dry leaf is a pu'er's first impression: how tight the leaves are, how lustrous the color, how many fine bits, how neatly it's pressed. As you learn to read dry leaf, remember that a beautiful cake surface is only the beginning, and the buds sprinkled on top don't necessarily represent the whole cake.
China's national standard GB/T 23776-2018 sets out how to conduct sensory evaluation of tea: pu'er is brewed twice at a 1:50 tea-to-water ratio, compressed tea steeps longer, and five factors are combined by weight. You can follow a simplified version at home too.
Guyuntang has two teas: Bingdao Old Village Dragon Pearls (raw pu'er), one pearl per brewing, and the Pu'er Pyramid Tea Bag Gift Box, which needs only a cup of hot water. How they differ, which a beginner should buy first, and which to choose for gifts or yourself, decided with one table.
Besides hot brewing, pyramid tea bags can be cold-brewed, made into milk tea, put in a thermos, or turned into a sparkling drink. How big a cup one bag suits, whether a thermos makes it too strong, and how to adjust for raw versus ripe: all the ways to vary your tea bag, explained.
Does pu'er get better the older it is? Is ripe tea's smell just mold? Does it need several rinses before you can drink it? Is pu'er cheap or expensive? We sort more than a dozen of the most common claims into vintage, processing, brewing, price, and labeling, and set out a more accurate version of each.
Guyuntang's Pu'er Pyramid Tea Bag Gift Box holds 24 bags, and one tea bag with a cup of hot water is all you need. Who it suits, how many cups one bag makes, whether you can take it abroad, how it differs from whole leaf, and how to use it at the office, on the road, and as a gift.
Bingdao Old Village Dragon Pearls come 10 to a bag. What's the safest way to store them? How soon should you finish them after opening, can you let them age slowly, who do they suit as a gift, and what brewing notes can you include? Practical details on storage and gifting, all here.
Does pu'er have caffeine? Does ripe pu'er have less? How much should you drink, and when? A practical guide for everyday tea drinkers.
An 8 g dragon pearl usually gives 8–12 infusions in a gaiwan. What if you have to leave halfway through? Can you keep steeping the next day? Can you split one pearl into two sessions? Practical ways to enjoy a dragon pearl from the first infusion to the last drop.
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