Wing-Chi Ip, Pu-erh Tea Sage
If you've sipped from our selection of pu-erh tea, you might have tasted our friend Wing-Chi Ip's work. Ip is the founder of LockCha teahouse in Hong Kong and has been an important player in the pu-erh industry for over four decades. The bingchas (puerh cakes) he's personally sourced and pressed from Yunnan have stood the test of time, aging into drinkable antiques with vivid flavors and distinctive personalities.
While working on our own pu-erh storage room, we rediscovered a transcript from an old conversation with Ip about sourcing quality pu-erh tea and how his industry has changed through the trends of recent decades. We'd like to introduce you to one of our own pu-erh tea-chers to shed light on how we source this unique fermented tea from China's Yunnan province.
How do you find good pu-erh?
I have an experienced palate, nothing else. I don't know as many mountains as [mainland] Chinese people; they make it so strange and complicated. I just taste the tea and think, "this is good," because my palate told me this is good. That's it. Then I take this batch and make some cakes. I don't have a farm or a factory. There are too many people doing that already and I don't need that. The strongest part of my pu-erh is the taste that I like. Maybe people just follow my lead to sell pu-erh, but my taste is an authentic idea or traditional idea about real pu-erh.
What does real pu-erh mean to you?
Nowadays, pu-erh is made like a green tea and the processing is getting industrialized. It's not a homemade thing like before. I just try to resume the tradition. I learn from tea drinking history, books I've read and the experience I've had with the tea. I think this is what makes my tea a little bit different from others'. I have the memory of drinking pu-erh when I was five years old.
The pu-erh market has changed a lot since you were young. What was it like then?
In the 1980s people would present samples to you. "This is the cake, do you like this cake?" And if you liked the cake you would buy it. We were trained to rely on taste because at that time the name of the tea meant nothing. Cakes were all blended and had certain numbers which referred mainly to size of the leaves, and to a lesser extent the taste of the tea leaves in the blend. Each lot is a little bit different. Even the same production number from the same year.
And how would you say it's different now?
At that time I avoided fragrant teas, but now people in Yunnan people appreciate it as light fragrant raw tea, with aroma and sweetness. I think that tea is good to drink now but isn't made not for storing long-term. If you want to make tea to drink today, you have to control the frying temperature and everything, but if you want to do it so the tea can age in ten years, it's different. Small leaves don't age well and green teas are usually picked from younger leaves. That's one reason that green cakes don't age well.
What's the problem with that "green" pu-erh?
I think at the beginning [of the pu-erh boom in the 1970s] there wasn't much difference. People in Yunnan drank more green and black tea than pu-erh. By the 2000s, they thought of pu-erh as a good investment, so makers focused on making pu-erh but didn't pay much attention to the taste or aroma. They were more concerned with how quickly they could sell it. Many producers had never tasted properly aged pu-erh except for some cake stored on a shelf for display.
Then visiting experts who were trained in Anhui or Zhejiang Province—areas where they make green tea—came in and gave makers advice on what to do. "This tea is too smoky, that one has too much fine dust." They tried to make the tea in a "proper" way, which for them was like green tea. Then they set up factories with electric ovens to fire the leaves. Now producers know a bit more about pu-erh processing and they've returned to drying the tea in the sun rather than in an oven, which is important for the bacteria in the leaves so they can ferment the tea over time.