hello everybody welcome back to our Channel I am Darth Maul. Hey everybody welcome back to the
channel it's Phil here and today we're gonna talk about a tea that has been gaining in popularity in
North America for quite some time now some people love this tea because of its health
benefits others because of its exotic origin and of course hopefully more than a few of them love
it because of its great taste you probably guessed that tea is Puerh are a detailed national definition
of pu erh does exist but the essence of it is really quite simple the tea has to come from Yunnan
it must be made from puerh material and the highlight of the process has to be the Sun drying
step an interesting thing about the word puerh is that it is actually Chinese for Assamica so
puerh tea has to be made by definition from Assamica material you may have tried pu er from
other regions like Myanmar or Laos is it really pu er well strictly and according to the definition
no but our take on it is as long as it's clearly labeled and it covers the flavor and the process
of puerh it's all good we're just here to enjoy great tea so whenever your pu erh comes from you
may have noticed that it's surrounded with all kinds of crazy terminology and lingo the
two most common of these are Sheng and Shu Sheng Pu'er simply means raw puerh shu pu erh means ripe puerh
are but you'll sometimes hear it translated as cooked pu erh this is actually a mistranslation
but don't worry about it too much it's even easy for a native Chinese speaker to make this mistake
it all starts with sheng puerh which is made through a process of kill green rolling and sundry and that
gives us sheng puerh mao cha which is basically loose leaf sheng pu erh are we started there because we
can't make shu pu'er without sheng puerh mao cha the key step in shu puerh is the piling process where we
take that sheng pu'er mao cha and we basically compost it but make no mistake this composting
step is not simple and requires a high degree of precision in order to right the key tasting
notes of sheng pu er are that you're gonna have that bright hay barnyard sharpness and a golden
liquor shu puerh are is going to give you a darker red brown liquor with notes of leather wet wood earth
those kind of hints that's how we get loose-leaf sheng puerh and loose leaf shu pu'er but you've
probably noticed that puerh are almost always comes pressed into some sort of a form the three most
common forms are a Bing or a cake a zhuan or a brick and finally a tuo which I have no idea how
to translate into English so let's just call it a tuo these forms come in all kinds of different
sizes 50 grams 100 grams 357 grams you'll see all kinds of different ones who are can also come in
all kinds of other fun forms too coins mini tuo I've even seen pu erh press to look identical to
a chocolate bar isn't that awesome another word you're likely to see on your puerh packaging
is related to origin it may be a general region like Menghai a specific village like Banzhang
or even a precise mountain like Yiwu now we're getting into some of my favorite words related
to Pu'er what I like to call the fancy words gu su dan zhu qiao mu da ye there's so many of them do
I have to learn Chinese to enjoy puerh what do they mean how are they related to understand it better
we need to understand a couple well accepted conventions used to explain the tea plant in
China the first one is related to plant type of which there are three bush small tree and big
tree big tree is the one you'll often see related to puerh naming and it translates as - da shu
second commonly accepted convention is related to leaf size again there are three small leaf medium
leaf and big leaf again it's the big one that's related to pu erh naming and it translates to da ye
so is leaf size related to plant type well kind of pu erh Bush will always be big leaf but
it's very important to note that tea trees come with all the variety of leaf sizes small medium
and large two more important terms related to pu erh address the age of the tree and those are Lao Shu
and Gu Shu Lao Shu means old tree and gusu means ancient tree so when does a regular tree become
an old tree and an old tree become an ancient tree a good guideline is that Lao Shu should be
at least a hundred years old and gu shu shoes should be two to three hundred years old but with teas of
these quality you should never be shy to ask the age of the tree I really hope you enjoyed this
part primer if you've heard other terms related to puerh that I didn't cover in this video leave
them down in the comments below we'd love to try and help you decode them if you liked the video
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