I love Puerh! I’ve dedicated 10 years of my life (10,000+ hours) to it and now gearing for the next 10 years of deliberate practice and deeper learning.
Since the beginning I’ve sought out the most expert tea people in the world, and I spent a long time with them absorbing their knowledge. It’s obvious when you meet them they don’t do it for money or fame, but just because they genuinely love tea and it’s the way they prefer using their time and this is what sets them apart. I aspire to follow in their steps.
I went to extraordinary lengths to able to immerse myself in Puerh as much as I could, from where I lived, the lifestyle I had and eventually culminating in sourcing and sharing tea via Puerh.uk: I sell and produce puerh so that I can be close to and learn about Puerh. I found this is extremely common in the people that know the most about Puerh: they really love it and their commercial activity is almost accidental (you can tell because they forget to chase money you owe them, they care more about you understanding the tea than buying it, etc).
For the last few years my wife and partner in puerh.uk Una (in the picture above) has joined me, particularly to help communication with our Chinese partners, suppliers and collectors, but she’s now an expert in her own right too, she’s a great example of how these skills can be taught in a much shorter time than it took me to learn by myself.
My apprenticeship
Without my teachers I would’ve figured out maybe 5-10% of what I know today. Self-practice is important, but one easily gets stuck in narrow ideas (that are easily shattered when somebody points out things to you). Of course I did a fair 10.000+ hours of practice/learning/exploration but without their help they wouldn’t have been nearly as effective.
My main two teachers are:
- Lim Ping Xiang (left): The most knowledgeable “tea person” I know. Seeing him teaching me and others live was the inspiration for me to offer to do it. After about 50 years of teaching and being the highest authority for Chinese tea in Malaysia, he’s now technically ‘retired’ but still as excited in learning about tea as a young man would be and extremely clear and insightful when he teaches.
- Chen Huay Yuan of Chen Yuan Hao (right): Arguably the main reason we drink ancient tree Puerh today as we do, among the first people in the Taiwanese expedition in Yiwu in the late 90s and the one that produced most of high quality ancient tree Puerh in the 2000s. Despite being Taiwanese, even after almost 30 years of activity he still lives most of the year in Yunnan (very rare among producers) and spends most of his days drinking new Puerh.
But there are more significant people who have been very influential with what they shared with me, from our Chinese partner in making benchmark ancient tree tea to Malaysian collectors that hold a full series of antique teas to Taiwanese colleagues, Yunnanese puerh producers, etc.
I drank a lot of the antique era (1900s-1950s) puerh cakes, learnt how to distinguish genuine old tea from fake, tried tea from tens of storages, tried thousands of different puerh, produced and sourced teas from terroirs/extremely ancient trees that are never seen in the west and hardly in Asia either and generally went as deep as one can into any topics related to puerh.
I’m really excited to share with you what I’ve learnt so far.
Advancing the state of the art
We constantly try to deliver new, ground-breaking work and teas that is not available elsewhere (certainly in english language, and often in any language).
For example we created guides like Brew Puerh like a Pro, How to identify fake and genuine old tea, How to identify the real taste of ancient tree Puerh and sourced teas that are not available almost anywhere (even in Asia): from genuine 1950s tea, to the first gushu cakes in late 90s-early 2000s, to the oldest trees in the best terroirs of Yunnan. We only started to produce our own tea once I was sure we could do better than anything available in the market at the time, it took a long time to reach this standard but we finally got there, and the critical reception has been overwhelmingly positive.
Picture: the extremely rare 2001 CYH Yiwu pure gushu
My main areas of interest
1: Make the best of Puerh (the “objective” side)
- Brewing and preparing it to its best: Gongfu technique, tea ware required
- Deep appreciation: understanding deeper characteristics like aftertaste, persistence, smoothness and splash, together with the more obvious taste qualities (texture, sweetness, etc)
- Authenticity: recognising genuine ancient tree, the real age of old tea, presence of pesticides, 1st spring pick vs mixed, etc
- Identifying highest quality: which terroirs, processing types and old cakes are best
- Storage (long term transformation): including forming a buying and collection strategy
2: Self cultivation (the “subjective” side)
I don’t talk about it on this website very much because it’s implicit in learning Gongfu, but the reason to drink Puerh perhaps it’s not just for the taste? It’s fine to focus on the taste actually because just focusing on something that’s not us by default makes us feel more free (less thinking about “self” worries).
But if you’re interested to explore explicitly how Puerh can enhance your life, I’m happy to share what I know about it. It’s a topic close to my heart as that’s how I’ve used it in the last 10 years (and I feel my life works much better now than 10 years ago ;). Choice is up to you, we can stick on technical topics (as described above) or delve into these more “personal/spiritual” ones if you prefer.
Booking
For live sessions in Brighton, please write me to agree a date. I generally meet guests at 10am but there can be some flexibility (up to early afternoon). Weekdays are easier, but weekends are also possible.
I’m really looking forward to share tea with you,
Paolo
PS: free state of the art puerh/old tea teaching essays can also be found in the Learn section of this website.