Pu’er gets better with age! All it needs is to be stored at room temperature away from smells, light or moisture.
Lower humidity environments mean slower aging but less risk of mold and a more complex flavor over time. Keep the pu’er open to airflow, in its paper wrappers and stored in non-airtight containers.
Taste your pu’er every year and write down your thoughts. Keep the tasting notes with the tea so you can see how it changes over time. Expect good pu’er to become deep and complex as it ages.
A sheng pu’er cake is sometimes referred to as a raw tea cake. “Raw” here means that the tea has not undergone intentional high-moisture pile-fermentation.
Shu pu’er or cooked pu’er is tea that has been intentionally piled and fermented in a high moisture environment to kickstart faster aging.
Young sheng pu’er tends to be greener, more floral and fresher tasting, growing deep and dark over years, while shu pu’er starts out dark and earthy.
No matter the tea cake vintage, good pu’er should never need to age out of off, sour, musty, or unpleasantly smokey flavors. These are signs of bad leaf or bad craft.
Why do you sometimes see 普洱 written as "pu’er" and other times you see people talking about "how does pu-erh tea taste" or "how long to age pu-erh" - what’s with the spelling difference?
Well, "Pu-Erh" comes from the old system for spelling Chinese characters called Wades Giles. This system was developed by Jesuit missionaries, not linguists or even native Chinese speakers.
Pinyin, developed by linguists in China and Bulgaria, replaced Wades Giles decades ago. Pǔ'ěr is the standard transliteration for 普洱 in Pinyin, but no matter the spelling system, we pronounce the tea the same.
It’s pu “are” - /puar/ - not pu “air.”