Shou pu-erh
The sheng route for five steps, and then a fork: the maocha is wetted, heaped and fermented by living organisms for weeks before anything is pressed.
What makes this route what it is
One fork, at position six, between two routes that are otherwise identical for their first five steps and their last three. What sits in the fork is the only genuinely microbial operation in the mainstream tea catalogue, and it is why the two teas that come out of it have almost nothing in common in the cup.
The route, in order
Each note describes what the step is doing in this route. The same operation does a different job in a different chain.
Usually coarser and cheaper material than goes into a good sheng, because the fermentation will dominate whatever the leaf brought to it. Fine material is used for the top grades and the argument about whether it is worth it is genuine.
As for sheng. The two routes are indistinguishable at this point.
As for sheng, cool and incomplete. The surviving enzymatic capacity matters less here, but the maocha is made the same way and often bought from the same producers.
As for sheng. Heavier rolling is common on material destined for the pile, because a more thoroughly ruptured leaf lets the fermentation work through it faster and more evenly.
As for sheng, and the last step the two routes share. What arrives at step six is ordinary sheng maocha.
The fork. Measured water is sprayed and worked through the dry leaf until the moisture is evenly distributed, and how much goes in is the decision that most determines what the finished tea tastes like.
Weeks under cover, with a mixed population of moulds, yeasts and bacteria growing through a heap that generates its own heat. Genuinely microbial, and the reason the word fermentation is correct here and almost nowhere else in tea.
Scheduled turns that drop the core temperature, admit oxygen and even out the population. The turning record is the batch record, and two piles run for the same number of days can produce unrelated teas.
- 9.
Drying
The heap is opened out and spread rather than re-covered, so it cools and dries and the fermentation stops. The same operation as a turn, performed for the opposite reason.
Screening into the grade names the category is sold by. Fine grades come off the same pile as coarse ones, which is why grade here describes particle size rather than a separate manufacture.
As for sheng, and from here the two routes converge again.
Cakes, bricks and nests. Hydraulic pressing is the norm, because a shou is not usually being pressed with a thirty-year trajectory in mind.
A great deal of shou is sold loose and never pressed at all, which is unusual in a category defined by its formats.
Slower and less critical than for sheng, because the tea has already been through a controlled wet process and the maker is no longer protecting an unfinished state.
How it differs from its neighbours
A route described on its own teaches very little. The useful fact is always which other route it is nearly identical to, and where it leaves it.
The two routes are the same tea up to a point. Everything before the divergence is shared; everything after it is not.
Five identical steps, then one fork. Sheng holds and presses; shou wets and ferments. Everything anybody believes about the difference between raw and ripe pu-erh is a consequence of what happens in steps six to nine, and nothing at all before them.
This route inserts an operation the other does not have. Nothing is substituted and nothing is removed.
A genuinely microbial operation inserted into an otherwise ordinary route. It is the only place in the mainstream catalogue where living organisms are part of the manufacture rather than of the storage, which is why calling black tea fermented and shou fermented with the same word is so destructive.
Where it goes wrong
Too little water and the pile never reaches temperature, so the tea stays green, rough and unconverted. Too much and the interior goes anaerobic and sours, giving the sharp wet-cellar note that no ageing removes. Too few turns and the core overheats and carbonises while the outside stays raw, so one batch contains both faults.
In full
Shou is not aged sheng and it is not sheng made faster. Up to the sun-drying the two are the same manufacture, and then shou does something no other tea route does except within its own family: measured water is worked through the dry maocha, the wetted leaf is heaped and covered, and a mixed population of moulds, yeasts and bacteria grows through the mass over weeks. The pile generates its own heat, and it is steered by turning — shovelling the whole mass over on a schedule so that outside becomes inside, which drops the core temperature and admits oxygen. At the end the heap is opened out and dried, which stops the process, and only then is the tea sorted, steamed and pressed. Everything characteristic of the finished tea — the dark liquor, the smooth body, the earthy and woody register, the complete absence of the bitterness a young sheng has — is the work of those weeks.