ZhenTea said

Pu'er questions - Zhen is in Yunnan with Mr. Wei at Menghai

Hey Steepster,

Zhen is in Yunnan right now working with Mr. Wei of 7542 fame (among other claims to fame). Without being too self promotional we would love to provide you with a chance to ask him any questions you might have about the process of making great Pu’er or anything Pu’er or tea related.

As a primer, here’s some of the work Zhen and Jianli have done over the last couple days:

Zhen and Jianli picked about 2 kg of leaves yesterday and started the withering process. Today they will continue with the process. They are using two methods to make the Pu’er. One is the traditional way, and the other employs a ‘kill green’ step.

So, ask away. I’ll pass on your questions to Zhen and bring the answers back to you here. Again, I don’t want to be overly self promotional, but there is more information about our 2016 tea trip at our website.

Looking forward to getting some answers to your questions.

Cheers,
Phil

5 Replies
Psyck said

How will the pu’er made with the ‘kill green’ step age in comparison with to traditional methods?

bw85 said

I’m curious to hear about this too.

Awhile ago I read a credible source who talked about a change in how puerh was processed. 20 years ago, fresh puerh didn’t taste like it does today, which was why most people didn’t drink it un-aged. The change in processing that started in the 2000’s produced fresh tea that was much more enjoyable and easy to drink without the need to age the tea. Is the “kill green” the change that took place? Or were other processing changes involved?

ZhenTea said

Hi Psyck, your question is something we have been thinking too. So we actually did a experiment. The results won’t be clear till years later, but we think it’s worth looking at. Here’s some details http://www.zhentea.ca/yunnan-puer-experiment/
Hope it will answer your question, and please don’t hesitate to ask if you have any further questions.

Psyck said

Thanks, nice article.

Login or sign up to post a message.

ZhenTea said

Sorry it took so long to get to answering you. With Zhen in China I have been really busy here. The short answer is that the modernization of the process, ie. adding a kill green step, a rolling step or both, make the tea taste ‘better’ sooner. BW85’s source is correct, these techniques are fairly new, having been introduced around the early 2000’s, but there are a lot of folks claiming that rolling and kill green are actually the ‘traditional’ process. We have found no historical evidence to support this claim. If you want to read more about it (and some experiments that we are conducting with these processes) you can check out our post about it here.

http://www.zhentea.ca/yunnan-puer-experiment/

Login or sign up to post a message.

Login or sign up to leave a comment.