Amy oh

Nice flavors!

What’s wrong with keeping shengs in the kitchen?

If you intend to keep a puerh for a while, they can absorb the odors from food/cooking and alter the taste

If you are storing pu’er at home, it will help if you keep it in a cardboard box to at least shield it a little from cooking smells, spices. Incense, perfumes, colognes, air sprays… all of those things will quickly absorb into pu’er tea (not to mention they are hell on the body because of the chemicals). The more one can keep pu’er away from odors, the better. Here at our shop, we have all our teas in a special vault with proper airflow, proper humidity and temp, air filtration and ZERO odors other than the livin’ thing that is pu’er tea.

One also does not want to store it where dry air (heating, air conditioning) is blowing on it. It will dry out the tea and stop/greatly inhibit its aging.

Totally going on the shopping list, thanks for the review!

Great info Garret…….Thanks. :))

Garret – I have steam heat. I wonder how that would affect the tea?

Aha. Thanks!

Hi everyone :) Steam heat is nice because you don’t have that forced air drying the heck outta your stash! In MN it gets cold and dry during the winter and even without forced air, the humidity in houses can get quite low. If one has the space (and the gumption), they can make their own little humidor out of a closet (as long as you can get airflow established) using a small humidifier. One must be careful, though, to really watch the % of humidity. Too wet and you’ve got mold and funk. No good.

I can’t imagine it getting too dry in the Bay Area, though, even in cold weather. Am I correct in saying that?

I did have a customer bring in a cake of tea she was all excited about that she had brought from some dealer while visiting China. She had not used it because she didn’t really know what to do with it. She brought it here to me, after discovering we were here. I took one whiff of it in the ornate box she had it in and knew instantly that it had been stored in a cupboard with curry and other spices. Not good. Sure enough, when we made the tea… it was totally wrecked because of the spice aromas that is had stewed in while in her cupboard. It was useless. Too bad, too, because the tea factory itself is a good one and the leaf looked tremendous. It does not take long for pu’er to soak up the odors around it (cooking smells, INCENSE, cigarettes, air spray, perfumes, etc) and it never lets go of the aromas once it grabs ahold of them.

Be careful out there, people :)

May you all have the best of health!!