Ingredients · Tea

Pu-erh

Camellia sinensis var. assamica · Theaceae (tea family)

Pu-erh
The only tea that is genuinely fermented. Black tea is oxidised — a chemical reaction in the leaf — but pu-erh is worked on by moulds, bacteria and yeasts, which is why it tastes of forest floor, wet stone and leather rather than of leaf. Raw pu-erh ages slowly over years and is sold by vintage; ripe pu-erh is fermented fast by wet piling, a method developed at the Kunming Tea Factory in 1973 to get the same effect without the wait. It is pressed into cakes, nests and bricks.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partLeaf
KindTea
CaffeineContains caffeine
Where it is fromChina
TasteEarth, forest floor, wet stone, leather and dark wood; smooth and very dark in the cup
How to brew it
  • 212°F / 100°C
  • rinse first, then 30 seconds to 2 minutes, many infusions

How to use it

Rinse the leaf with boiling water and pour it away before the first real infusion — this is standard for pu-erh and it matters. Then boiling water, short steeps, many times over. It takes milk in the Tibetan manner, with butter and salt. Good after a heavy meal, and one of the few teas that is better in the evening than the morning.

With food

Rich and fatty food — roast duck, pork belly, dim sum. Mushrooms. Dark chocolate. Caramel and butterscotch. Blue cheese. Dates and dried figs.

With spices

Aged orange peel, the chenpi tradition. Ginger. Chrysanthemum. Cinnamon. Cardamom.

With tea

Blended with caramel, coffee and almond in the dessert direction, which is what this shop does with it.

Its story

Where it comes from

Yunnan province. Since 2008 the Chinese government has treated pu-erh as a product with geographical indications, restricting the name to tea from specific regions of Yunnan. The Blang and Dai peoples have made it on Jingmai Mountain since at least the tenth century, growing old tea trees in the forest understorey; the Cultural Landscape of Old Tea Forests of the Jingmai Mountain was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2023 — China's first tea-related site. Whether our lot is raw or ripe, and its vintage year, are not confirmed.

What happened

Pu-erh is named for a market town in southern Yunnan, now Ning'er. It went north and west on the Tea Horse Road — caravan paths from Yiwu and Pu'er in Xishuangbanna through Dali, Lijiang and Shangri-La to Lhasa, and on to Nepal and India. Tea went up and Tibetan ponies came down, a trade running back to the Song dynasty, when the court needed cavalry horses for its wars against the northern nomads; porters sometimes carried sixty to ninety kilograms of pressed tea, often more than their own body weight, leaning on metal-tipped staffs. In Tibet it became butter tea, boiled long and churned with butter and salt. The imperial prefecture the tea is named for was made by conquest: in 1727 and 1728 the Qing put down the Diao clan's resistance in southwest Yunnan, and in 1729 the territory was reorganised as Pu'er prefecture. Demand surged in Hong Kong in the 1950s, and mass production of ripe pu-erh began in 1975.

On the shelf with it

Sold on its own, and in these blends.

Every ingredient in the shop

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Other ways in

Ingredients Every plant, seed, bark and salt in the shop on one page — what it is, why it is in the blend, and where it comes from. See them all Collections Every shelf in the shop on one page — teas by leaf and flavour, spices by kind and cuisine. Open any shelf to see what is on it. Browse the shelves The Showroom The whole shop on one floor — every tea, spice and blend, filtered by what you are after, with the basket beside you. Open the Showroom Elsewhere Seventeen short trips — a place, a moment, a feeling — each with the teas and spices that get you there. Take a trip