STiR coffee and tea magazine

STiR coffee and tea 23 Bulang couple firing Pu'er tea, Meng Jing Village, Jingmaishan, Simao, Yunnan. Bulang woman picking tea from 500 year-old trees, Ai Leng Mountain, Jingmaishan, Simao, Yunnan, China. woody aroma and flavor has come to be highly valued. Aged Pu'er, lao sheng cha, is considered the pinnacle, but at what point it has aged suffi- ciently to be taken seriously is disputed. In terms of market value, it is the truly old bing, of 40, 60, 80, or 100 years, that are sought after by connoisseurs. Aged Pu'er became so highly valued that since the 1970s it has been mimicked through a microbial food-processing technology known as hou fa jiao (post-fermentation 'cooking' or 'ripening') that involves heap-fermenting loose green Pu'er with microorganisms in a warm humid environment. This force-fermented Pu'er is known as shu cha (cooked tea) to distinguish it from the traditional sheng cha (raw tea). The process typically starts by spraying dried loose green leaves with water and then piling them to about a meter in height and several meters wide and covering them with bamboo mats or fabric to keep the pile moist and to promote inoculation of ambient microorganisms, and the fermentation is allowed to continue for between several hours and a few weeks. Pu'er factories are increasingly experimenting with inoculating the leaves with selected microorgan- isms, such as Aspergillus (used to ferment other foods and beverages such as soy sauce and miso). Finally, the brown leaves are pressed into cakes. Pu'er connoisseurs regard shu cha less highly than the naturally fermented, and aged sheng cha.

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