Speaking of Pu-erh tea, always The topic that cannot be avoided is “matching”. And there are mixed reviews and debates. The focus of the debate is whether it is better to mix or pure materials. But it seems that there will never be a standard answer. Today, we will sort out why Pu’er tea is blended in the way of solving the case. What’s the secret behind it?
There are many kinds of Pu-erh tea blending techniques circulating on the market, which are mysterious and unpredictable. In fact, it is more of a business behavior that is tricky and self-proclaimed. Matchmaking, whether successful or not, is a man-made trouble, and there must be enough motives behind it. The dazzling variety of techniques can be summed up into two motives.
One is for the benefit of reducing costs, and the other is for the exploration of improving quality and taste. No matter what stage of Pu-erh tea history, these two motivations cannot escape, which is due to human nature.
Let’s first look at commercial blending to reduce costs. If there is a tea that costs 1,000 yuan per pound, and another 500 yuan per pound tea is added at a ratio of 1:1, the resulting tea is 750 yuan per pound. If a bad businessman tells you that this is 1,000 yuan per pound of tea, if you can’t drink it, the business will increase its profits.
In this way, the mix can be endless. But things are not that simple. Simple blending to reduce costs is often easy to find, mainly because of the incongruity of taste. Mixing two or more low-end tea leaves is difficult to produce a high-end taste.
It’s like bartending, you can mix it and drink it, so there is no need for a bartender to exist. Even in order to reduce costs, responsible merchants still need to do sufficient experiments to find a coordinated and balanced taste, so that the public can accept it while reducing costs.
But there are fewer and fewer such merchants. Many merchants on the market simply don’t bother to mix and match the tea.
If you don’t believe me, open a certain sound and a treasure to search Laobanzhang, Iceland, Yiwu, Minttang and other well-known tea hills. The tea leaves that come out range from 19.9 yuan to several thousand yuan. Since they are the same raw materials, the price difference is hundreds of times. , who can explain why?
Come again Look at the second blending motive, which is to improve the taste and quality of the exploration. Sometimes in order to improve the quality and taste, the cost of tea cannot be considered for the time being. Instead, we only consider the characteristics of tea from different producing areas, how to make the tea complement each other, promote strengths and avoid weaknesses, and synthesize a more perfect tea.
This requires blenders to have a full understanding of various teas and countless experiments. A sign of success (there is no standard) is that two or more teas mixed together taste better than each of them alone, which is also less likely. It can be said that half of it depends on experience and half on luck. Even if it was successful at the time, whether it will perform better after ten or twenty years depends on the will of God.
It is said that there are now some well-funded large factories that use teas that are recognized as delicious on the market for trace element testing, and then find teas with similar contents to press cakes, so as to imitate teas that have already performed well. baseThis ended in failure, and most of the products have completely different tastes. This is a bit like seeking a sword in a boat, and it is also like a joke between God and science.
With the continuous rise of ancient tree tea from famous mountain and famous villages, more and more people imitate the ancient tree tea of famous mountain villages. But most of them are just scheming and fooling Xiaobai.
Imagine that a piece of tea tree has been rooted in one place for hundreds of years, and the mineral elements and essence of heaven and earth it absorbs must be unique. It is too unlikely to imitate it artificially.
Like the old banzhang, how many people tried to make a similar taste with other teas, but all ended in failure. It is said that there is a very powerful factory that spent tens of millions on research and development, trying to make a tea with a taste similar to the old banzhang. After numerous failures, it finally gave up.
Because as long as people who have drank the real old banzhang pure ingredients, they can get back that feeling after about two brews. If not, they will not have such a unique taste and body feeling. Therefore, the taste of good tea is unique and difficult to imitate. Moreover, we must drink it before we can have good memories and associations, and can also form a correct anchor in our mind. Unpleasant to drink, it will form a bad anchor in the brain.
This is the secret of Pu’er tea blending. Whether the match is good or not depends on the motivation. From the consumer’s point of view, it is still necessary to learn to taste.
To repeat the old saying, If you can’t drink the difference, what is the difference between the 10,000-pound Lao Banzhang and the 10-yuan Taiwanese tea? Or ten yuan a bottle of soju and several thousand yuan Moutai are the same.
Wang Yangming’s “Heart” There’s nothing out there” really makes sense, if you can’t feel something, it doesn’t exist for you. The key is that in the field of Pu’er, teas with the same substance test results can also taste completely different. Who really exists? Who can tell.
Content Planning: Shanghai Tea City- Deft
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