Dollars vs. Puerh
For those of you who may be a bit more experience with buying Puerh, you have no doubt come across terms like “budget tea” or “everyday drinker tea” amongst many variations. These terms are based around non-expensive teas that are affordable for people on a budget. The teas are also often described as being a good value for your dollar, or good enough to scratch the itch. In other words teas that are good enough to want to drink daily, that don’t cost a lot, but that are also not as good or as great of quality as a cake that would cost says between $80-$200.
And so when it comes to Puerh that care labeled as “Old Arbor”, “Gushu” or “Ancient Tree” you very rarely see any of the above terms included in their descriptions. This is because these teas are “supposedly” made from very rare and expensive material that comes from old tea trees/ plants. I say “supposedly” because until you’ve tasted it, and have they experience to know the difference, we don’t actually know how true this is. Is it could be, but we are also at the mercy of the information given by the vendor, but I’ll dig into that another day.
My personal opinion on this is that all tea should be an everyday drinker, and everyday drinker tea should be just as good as the uber expensive teas. After all who wants to buy all these tasty teas and not be able to enjoy them as often as they want? I can understand having maybe 1 or 2 cakes that you drink on occasion because they are expensive, but for the most part your tea should always be delicious, high quality and affordable. But when it comes to these high cost teas, shouldn’t the taste of them reflect the price??? Good question!
I wanted an answer, and so to get it I did 2 blind taste tests. One with myself alone and then a second one with 3 friends. For these blind tastings I bought 4 sample sizes of Raw Puerh from White2Tea. The teas ranged in price from “Budget” to “Medium Expensive” to “Upper Expensive” to “Broke the Bank”. Each teas was blind tasted side by side, with no information besides what I was tasting. This same method was followed with 3 friends all of whom have little to no experience with Puerh. The outcome being how many of us would pick the more expensive teas simply based around taste.
The 4 teas tasted in order of price range lowest to highest were: (Canadian $)
- 2021 Hotline Space Coyote ($6.81 per sample or $43.25 per cake)
- 2021 680 ($13.17 per sample or $87.78 per cake)
- 2021 The Thing Is ($21.63 per sample or $147.57 per cake
- 2021 Is a Gift ($45.80 per sample or $316.77 per cake)
Now let me just say that all of them were very good but all for different reasons. I have so many tasting notes that I won’t include them with this post but maybe at a later date I’ll do a more detailed on. But as for results for the tasting I did on my own I very much preferred the “Budget” and “Medium Expensive” teas over the higher priced ones. 680 was my favorite of the 4, so much so that I will be buying a full cake in the future.
The results for the group tasting very different. 1 of the 3 favored the “Budget” tea over all others while the other 2 both favored the higher priced teas. So that’s 4 tasters, all with 3 different results. What does this mean? It means exactly what I thought going into the experiment which is that while price may reflect the material used to make the teas, it in no way reflects taste, and therefore a high price does not mean the teas will be good or bad. Ultimately taste is up to the drinker or the individual. And so what I think you should take from this as either a beginner, intermediate or well experience Puerh drinker is that should pay little attention to price and more to your gut.
Judge based on not only the price, but also the look of the tea, the description, reviews, and if you want to jump in that deep, where the tea was harvested and stored. But ultimately don’t avoid buying a Puerh because it’s classed as “Budget” and don’t buy because it’s expensive “Gushu”.