As I write, I am sitting in the cool and calm of Babington’s Tea Room in Rome.  Outside in the Piazza di Spagna, the temperature has soared to well over 30° C but inside I am quenching my thirst with a glass of refreshing iced peach tea.  I am here for three days of work with my friend Chiara who owns this traditional tea room that has attracted loyal tea drinkers since 1893. But more of Babingtons in my next blog for first I must tell of my adventures in China last month when I travelled in Yunnan province to learn about puerh tea.

As I explained in my last blog, I spent a week in May in Japan at various tea venues and after my last event, I met up in Kyoto with three tea friends - Tim d’Offay from Postcard Teas in London, Yoshie Matsumiya who has a tea store in Kyoto called ‘La Melangee’ and my Chinese friend Didi Liu who is currently studying tea in Japan and whose family makes excellent puerh teas in Yunnan.  With her parents, Didi had wonderfully put together a programme for us so that we could learn all about the mystery and manufacture of Yunnan’s aged teas and she had arranged tickets and travel plans so that all we had to do was assemble at Kyoto train station to take the train to the airport and fly off to Beijing.  From there we flew across country to Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, and were welcomed to Didi’s home by her mother and little sister who served us bowls of delicious puerh tea to help us recover from our travels.

The family’s apartment, which is also a showroom, tasting room and performance area for Chinese tea ceremonies, is filled with beautiful and fascinating tea wares from all around the world.  We were overwhelmed by the generous hospitality, by the amazing tea things that surrounded us and by the fact that here we were in China with a lovely family who could really help us to understand how puerh teas are made.  And over the coming days we were to drink some fabulous and unusual puerhs - more complex and delicious than any we had every tried.  And, better than that, we were to pluck leaves from ancient tea trees, actually make puerh tea ourselves and have the opportunity to ask endless questions to help clarify all the aspects of puerh that we had not understood before.  The family also have a shop close to Kunming Tea market which we also visited (here it is on the left)

From Kunming we flew south the next day to Xishuangbanna, at the heart of Yunnan’s puerh tea manufacture, and were met at the airport by Didi’s father who drove us up into the mountains to a village close to the Burmese border where the family’s tea garden lies protected behind a neat wooden fence and imposing gate.  On the way we stopped for the most delicious Chinese lunch we had ever eaten - a seemingly endless array of dishes overflowing with chicken, pork, crunchy green mountain vegetables, fish, rice, fruit and, for dessert, pineapple rice pudding, sticky and irresistible served inside the hollowed out pineapple shell - so good that Didi and Tim fought over second helpings! 

The trees in the Liu family’s tea garden are all several hundred years old, and the most revered and precious has reached the grand old age of 800 years.  The age of the trees from which leaf is plucked to make puerh tea has a direct influence on the value of the tea and so this is a very special place.  The leaves on these trees are much larger than on the tea bushes we see in tea plantations around the world (see the photo) and of course, here in Yunnan, with its unique blend of soil, weather, humidity and warmth, the taste of the teas is always a little earthy, sweet, complex and multi-layered.

During the next two days, we dressed up in the local tribal dress of the Hani villagers (the photo at the top shows Didi, Yoshie and myself dressed in Hani costume), took our baskets up into the forest nearby to collect new leaf shoots from the old trees and then learnt how the leaves are withered in the open air, then panned to de-enzyme the leaf and fix the green, then we rolled the big leaves until they were sticky and soft.  The tea was then left to dry in the sun for a day or two until it had lost most of its water content and had darkened in colour. 

We couldn’t use our leaves to make puerh because they needed time to dry and rest for about a month, but we did learn to make puerh with Didi and her father using loose leaves that had already been processed.  We watched as they were weighed into batches, then steamed, then tipped into a bag, shaped into a neat disc and then flattened under a very heavy stone weight to give the tea its characteristic flat, round form.  Once the cloth bag had been removed, the tea was ready for storing in humid, warm conditions to develop its characteristic aged tea flavour.  Here we are with our very own puerh cakes that we had rolled and flattened ourselves (with a little help from Master Liu, as you can se on the left!)

I shall be writing much more about Jin Damo puerh teas made by the Liu family and about the puerh industry in a forthcoming edition of Tea and Coffee Asia and more about the family and its philosophy and approach to puerh tea manufacture in Tea - A Magazine.

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