This enormous cardboard box contains our collection of Pu'er tea - all 15.5 kg of it! We've shipped it back in dribs and drabs, so it's been a surprise to realise just how much of this famous Yunnan product we've been gifted (we never ever bought one...) over the years. I've just finished cataloguing it ready for storage: 33 "bing" (360g round flat cakes); 13 "zhuan" bricks (popular in the Tibetan market) and 10 "tuo cha" (small bowls). That's just the compressed stuff - we've got sacks and sacks of loose tea of various types as well! The compressed tea is either "sheng" (raw) or "shu" (cooked/processed). The shu cha is ready for drinking now, artificially aged by 6 months of fermentation/oxidisation in a factory. The majority of the tea though is 2-5 year old sheng cha, raw large-leaf green tea from the mountains of southern Yunnan, often wild (non-plantation) or ancient trees. It can be drunk now (a lovely yellow/orange brew), but ideally we'll let it age for 4 or 5 decades so that it can ferment naturally - so Freda and Edie may enjoy the resulting exquisite red/brown earthy infusion if their parents don't!
So, how many cups of tea does 15.5kg of Pu'er tea make? Well, a teaspoon is about 3g, so that's more than 5,000 teaspoons. And a teaspoon of tea can produce anything from 10-20 cups of tea, depending on the level of fermentation. Fifty to a hundred thousand cups of tea? It's a mind-boggling thought. Now, all we have to worry about is finding the best place to store the stuff. 25 degrees C and 60-80% humidity is easy enough in Yunnan, but up here in frigid Scotland a lot harder. Maybe we should just sell it all on eBay?!
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