Puer

Puer (also spelled pu-erh, puerh, or pu’er) is a unique category of tea from Yunnan, China. What makes puer different is that it’s fermented and aged, and often pressed into shapes like cakes or bricks. Some even come in mushroom or bowl shapes. The cakes are often 375g, which sounds like a really random number, until we see that the cakes are bundled into “barrels” of seven cakes. A barrel makes 2.5 kg of tea. 

Compressing tea made transportation easier. This is tea the was grown and processed in Yunnan, China, and then transported over long trade routes. One of them is known as the Tea Horse Road, which facilitated the exchange of Chinese tea for Tibetan horses. This route was a network of trails that connected Yunnan, China to Tibet, Nepal, and India.  

Most puer teas are blends, made by mixing leaves from different farms or seasons to create a specific flavor. Big factories often use four-digit codes to label their blends. Smaller producers—many of the ones we work with—don’t use those codes, but the quality is excellent. 

Within the category of puer tea, the first distinction is cooked versus raw.