Puerh tea

  Puerh surely boasts the most mystery and imagination of the tea world. This is due to multiple factors: the beautiful shapes the tea leaves are pressed into; the unusual and seductive aromas they impart; the tangible physical and emotional effect they gift the present drinker; all the legends about their production; the fact that they are a fermented product and thus have great effects on digestion; that they can be aged and stored for endless decades. Puerh is a class of tea which hails from Yunnan, China, and the best ones are from older trees, not younger bushes. Tree varietals in that area, unlike tea bushes in other provinces, can live for centuries and even thousands of years.
We speak of two kinds of puerh teas: sheng (raw/uncooked/green) which are what traditional puerhs always were - green, steamed and dried leaves pressed into cakes for aging, and shou (ripe/cooked/dark), whose leaves have been more quickly fermented by a compost-like method in a process invented in the early 1970s. Either way, these are potentially life-changing teas...just see what we mean...