STiR coffee and tea magazine

STiR coffee and tea 27 The ultimate refresher in tea bags Are you looking for a sugar-free refreshment that meets the needs of your customers? Easy to prepare, yet as convenient as possible? With Cold Brew, all you have to do is toss a tea bag into cold water, wait a few minutes and stir or shake a little. Enjoy your cold tea at home or on the go. Create your individual Cold Brew with us. Organic and environmentally friendly packaging is also possible. Benefit from Hälssen & Lyon's more than 145 years of experience in the tea industry and discover our large range of tea specialities, herbal blends, fruit infusions and spices, sourced from around the world. www.haelssen-lyon.com Cold Brew Feng gestures to a basket of Liu Bao tea. "Approximately 50% of the material used in this tea is from Yunnan," he re- marks, out of the customer's earshot. "But all the major com- panies use outside teas. Liu Bao itself doesn't produce enough material to meet demand." Despite the riveting stories, traditional methods for creat- ing and aging Liu Bao tea account for only a small fraction of industry output. This is because the industry introduced mass- production techniques decades ago to produce large quantities of sellable product within a reduced time frame and to supply a rapidly expanding market. Faced with local material shortages, producers began to search farther afield and quickly discovered northern Vietnam, which had vast swaths of tea resources avail- able at competitive prices and conveniently borders Guangxi. Vietnamese tea imported via Hong Kong became a regu- lar ingredient in Liu Bao tea blends, and documents published by industry insiders in the 1990s openly praised Ha Giang teas for their ability to develop rich aromas. "Tea from Ha Giang is made using material from old-growth assamica tea trees," Feng remarks, "and it has a smoky note that ages into a betel nut aroma, which customers enjoy." Tea drinkers in Malaysia started acquiring a taste for Ha Giang tea without realizing its origins, before the name Liu Bao became more prestigious. Investment Storytelling Then, investors got involved. Liu Bao tea prices began a sharp rise in the late 2000s as speculators sought alternatives to Pu'er tea. It fit the criteria of an investment tea perfectly: lots of stock available at a low price, vintage years that could increase in value over time, and the potential to develop complex tasting notes through aging — but a good story was crucial for marketing. Rather than emphasizing the meticulous processing tech- niques developed in the nearby city of Wuzhou, which skillfully transformed and aged large amounts of tea sourced from north- ern Vietnam and other parts of China, the narrative focused on the classic tale of the town of Liu Bao itself. Now it's taboo to publicly acknowledge that materials sourced from outside Liu Bao are key to delivering the tea's distinctive taste. This taboo largely remains in place today. In both Yunnan and Guangxi, teas from Southeast Asia continue to play uncredited roles in the local tea industries. This enables tea makers in Pu'er and Liu Bao to access critical tea materials at low prices while retaining the benefits of registered GI status, all without yielding room for teas from Southeast Asia to develop their own footing. During periods of market downturns and oversupply, as is currently the case in the Pu'er and Liu Bao markets, this lack of visibility can bring sales to a screeching halt, leaving farmers stranded with large volumes of unsold inventory that must be stored in under-equipped warehouses, risking product spoilage. Market Downturn The demand to buy and store Pu'er and Liu Bao teas for aging is driven in part by the belief that the teas carry investment value and offer the potential to generate real financial returns. When those returns seem less likely amid a general economic slow- down in China, the market cools. A 2025 report by Taipei Times cites changes in the price of a unit of 15 kilograms of tea cakes produced by TAETEA (大益) as a benchmark: 70,000 RMB ($9,800) in 2017, 188,000 RMB in 2021, 108 RMB in 2023, and

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