When I was first starting to wrap my head around the depth of tea culture in China, I quickly realised I knew absolutely nothing about tea, and now after several years dabbling in it, and spending weeks in Yunnan utterly immersed in it, I can confidently tell you, I know absolutely nothing about tea.

Crucially, it’s not your classic; box of tea bags, a boiled kettle, spoon of sugar, and the pretentious milk before, or milk after you pour the water debate kind of tea. Worlds away. It’s a gorgeous, meditative, social practice where you slide through hours, gently rolling the tea through hot water, pour after pour of the same carefully measured pot of leaves, and between the politics and gossip you smell and slurp your delicate cup of tea noting the evolution of flavour, commenting how the initial subtle bitterness has faded away, and this time there are notes of honey, next time some floral notes, then fruitiness, before diving back into the topic of the day. There is a world of discovery, not just within tea, but those sitting around the table with you, some of my most memorable conversations in China have happened over the elegant ballet of a Chinese tea ceremony.

If you’ve ever gotten yourself wrapped up in the depth of a tea tasting, the grand finale is often a Pu’er tea, this is boss level tea. It’s not outrageous for a ⅓ of a kg to sell for tens of thousands of dollars, like whiskey, it’s about the aging, recently a 80 year old pu’er tea cake sold 1.8 million rmb (270 000 usd). As I said, boss level tea.

If you have had the pleasure of enjoying Pu’er tea you’ve likely found it very earthy, perhaps even a bit of a barnyard-y taste, it’s dark in colour like black tea, but smooth, complicated flavours, a little fruity and floral. This is the legendary Pu’er tea from the south of Yunnan province in China.

Here is the catch though, that ‘ancient’, ‘classic’, style of tea you drank, and is certainly one of the more common teas in China, that style of tea is younger than your grandpa. In the 1970’s, when China was opening up to foreign business under Deng Xiaoping and beginning to push it’s export market, there was a task force put together in Yunnan to try to make tea more accessible to international buyers, the result was to put it through a long fermentation process, smoothing out any bitter flavours to make it more convenient to just plop into hot water and have a good tea from the first pour, it also required a lesser quality of leaf, so it was easy to make Pu’er from the autumn harvest, or using younger trees, you were no longer limited to the best pick of leaves… However, this dark, rich tea wasn’t what Pu’er tea was before.

The other half of the world of Pu’er tea still uses the traditional method, without the long dedicated pile fermentation process, the result is a lighter tea, perhaps a little bitter with the first pour, but as you drink through the pours it opens up with gentle notes of honey, fruity and, floral fragrances, it’s a real treat to experience. For this, you need the best, highly selected leaves, ideally from an older tree, ideally sitting at high elevation, picked only in the spring before the summer rains hit.

If you’ve ever been on a wine tour, you’ll often hear the mention of the age of the vines. Simply, as plants get older, it takes a lot more effort to produce fruit, and so the fruit that is produce tend to be rich with flavour, this is true for tea as well. In the county of Menghai in southern Yunnan where I was spending time on the Li family’s farm, they had a batch of 40 year old trees, and a small collection of trees planted 200 years ago. High up in the mountains, with constant picking (imagine a bonsai tree) these, albeit slow growing trees, were less than 3 meters tall.. Still high enough for Mr and Mrs Li to have to nimbly climb into the trees to get to the highest branches. 

The best leaves are the new shoots from these older trees, picked in a one month window in the spring time after resting all winter and before it rains. The bitter notes in tea are often present in the water, which is why so much of the initial process is about removing that water, and why the best leaves are harvested in the dry spring months on the mountain tops of Yunnan. 

This is also why green teas are also more bitter, they haven’t had as many steps in the process that remove water. Modern type of pu’er tea which uses a 50 day fermentation to smooth out flavours, which, if you are harvesting tea outside of that window, or harvesting from younger trees, or being less selective with the leaves you pick, this method really pays off. It’s like aging a cheap wine. 

After the tea is harvested, roasted and dried it’s transported to factories, either to be fermented, or stored until it’s time to be packed into tight bricks, and sent out. Tea is often aged, sometimes for decades, smoothing out the flavour, commanding your attention and time to enjoy it as it unfolds, pour after pour. 

What goes into a shoot like this?

WSCG needed a combination of a documentary style video, as well as a range of product shots back in Shanghai, so for a week we filmed in the mountains of Yunnan, sleeping on the floor of the tea factory to capture harvest and followed the tea to the processing facility in the city where the tea was either further fermented, or formed into bricks, then back in Shanghai we spent a day shooting in their tea house to capture content for WSCG’s online shop.