When & Why to Break Up a Puerh Tea Cake

Hello Tea Friends! In our previous video, Shun showed us how to break up a Pu'er Cake completely and some of you asked some really insightful questions in the comments about why one would want to break up a Pu'er Cake completely so we thought we'd make another video on that topic. If you haven't yet watched that video where Shun shows us how to break up a Pu'er Cake, I recommend checking that out before you watch this video. So the question is why would you want to break a cake completely and that some people haven't seen really that process of breaking a cake completely and they might be used to just breaking little bits around the cake as they drink it but there actually are some good reasons to break up the cake completely which we'll discuss now. There are mainly two. The first reason is the minor reason. The first reason is that if you break up the whole cake in one sitting, chances are, if you're anything like me at least, that you'll do it a little bit more mindfully. If I take the time and set aside properly 20-30 minutes and I actually break the cake slowly, finding the places where the knife goes in of its own and damages the tea leaves as little as possible, I'll break the whole cake and the leaves will remain really really whole and it'll be all ready to drink. Whereas I find for myself that when I break as I go, I tend to break towards the inside of the cake and then the inside of the cake is usually more compressed and hard and then the last steepings of the tea from that cake are usually not as good because the leaves are more broken and tight whereas when I break the whole thing I can split it in half, get all those nice whole leaves and everything turns out really nice. So that's a minor reason and maybe that doesn't apply to you. Maybe you're very mindful as you go and you break evenly throughout the cake as you drink it but I tend to be less mindful when I take that approach and much more mindful if I take the time to actually break the cake completely which results in a much better mix of whole leaves and bits for every steeping so that I have an even distribution of leaves from different parts of the cake and most of them are whole. That actually is the only reason for breaking up a yangsheng cake. So if a cake is young, hasn't been stored that long, I haven't done experiments to mark the line as to where you don't need to break up a cake completely and after which you do want to break the whole cake up completely but I would suggest five years. Of course that depends on where the tea was stored but here in Taiwan around five years when the tea starts to get beyond five years I'm going to want to break the cake completely for the second reason which we'll discuss in a second but if the cake is younger than five years there's really no need to break the whole cake up. You can break it as you drink it other than if you're like me and you are more mindful when you actually break the whole cake up and that will then make a difference. But as poor tea ages it's actually fermenting and oxidizing and in the course of this video I'm going to talk to you about two experiments that I encourage that you do. One is a long term experiment and one is a shorter term experiment and you can do both of them to verify some of what I'm saying for yourself which is important not to just listen to YouTube videos but to gain experience. Tea is all about your own experiential truth not about our truth so I'll give you a couple experiments that you can do to learn about these things yourself. First a cake ages better than loose leaf tea. As poor tea is aging it's fermenting and oxidizing. I'm not entirely sure we do understand some of the reasons why cakes age better than loose leaf tea but there's a lot about fermentation that we just don't understand yet because there's not been enough study into the area of aging poor and this video is not about aging poor so you could experiment with various cakes and store them for around 5 years and have them in various states. If you have access to the same tea you could store one in Mao Cha, you could break one cake up completely, you could leave a cake whole and then you could break a cake partially. So you'd have a partially broken cake, a whole cake, a fully broken up cake in a jar and the loose leaf Mao Cha of that version of tea you'd have those all and after about 5 years taste them and I think you'll find as we have found in doing this experiment several times that the whole cake will be the best by far. So the whole cake ages better than the broken up one or certainly better than the loose leaf and this is in part maybe due to exposure to oxygen so the cake is like keeping a really nice even consistent oxidation and it's also maybe more conducive for the bacteria that are helping in the fermentation. In fact in the partially broken up cake after around 7 years we have found that we can even taste the difference between the tea around the part of the cake that is broken and the tea further into the cake that is still whole. So in other words you break off let's say 25% of a cake and you age it 5 or 7 years the tea right around the break will not be as good as the tea deeper into the cake. So a broken cake is not really ideal for storage but for the same reason it's also not really ideal for drinking. So since I don't know how long it's been certainly a part of poorer culture as long as I've been into poor for 25-30 years since the 90s and my teacher since he was young and maybe his teacher but there's always been a kind of process of what we call livening up an aged poor cake so and this is more important the older the poor gets so 7 years it's not as important as 10 as 15 as 20 as 30 the older the tea is the more important it is to liven it up and basically livening it up is breaking the whole cake up when you're ready to drink it and putting it in a jar and leaving it in the jar for about a month and this allows the inside that has been you know kind of trapped to be exposed to a little bit of oxygen and air and even out the tea. It makes the tea much smoother much more even and this brings us to our second experiment which is if you have two cakes of tea that are around 5-7 years old you can break one up completely and put it in a jar and leave it for a month and then come back and compare it side by side with a brew from the cake itself and a brew from the tea that you've now stored in the jar for around a month and you'll see that they're very different the one that has aired out in the jar will be really much better so that puts us in a place where a broken cake is neither ideal for drinking nor ideal for aging so having a cake that you're slowly drinking away from if you're going to store it long term doesn't make sense because it's not really aging well and if you've already aged it to the place where you want to age it and you're ready to enjoy it then breaking it up completely will also make it much better so traditionally we would break the whole cake up so these are the reasons for breaking up a poor cake completely versus breaking it as you go. I find that less people do this nowadays and this tradition of livening up the tea and breaking up the cake completely isn't as popular as it used to be but I think that's because a lot less people are drinking aged Sheng Pu'er. Aged Sheng Pu'er has gotten very expensive and rare and a lot of people are drinking young Sheng Pu'er and breaking up the cake completely isn't necessary for a young Sheng Pu'er cake other than if you like me find yourself more mindful and in doing so break the cake better and create less bits and things than doing it on the fly so that tradition kind of just fizzled out but there is going to be a resurgence of a big boom in the next 10-20 years of aged Pu'er because in the late 90s early 2000s a lot of more Pu'er was produced than ever before that time of course there's more produced now but more was produced then had ever been before that and a lot of that tea is being aged to maturity right now and will reach maturity in our lifetimes and there'll be a chance to drink a lot of great aged Sheng teas we have some on our website and we would recommend that those teas if they're above five or seven years that you break up the cake completely when you're ready to enjoy the tea so if you're going to store it keep the cake whole and if you're going to enjoy it break up the cake completely and put it in a jar I've never experimented again where the actual line is for that but I'm just going to say arbitrarily roughly five years this is why traditionally Pu'er lovers when we enjoy a Pu'er cake we will buy a Tong and a cake because of knowing that when the cake is whole in terms of long-term storage it's much better than a half broken cake or a broken up cake so by buying a Tong and a cake why do that well a Tong is seven cakes wrapped in the skin of bamboo bamboo trees drop their skin when they grow and that and bamboos are quite large in Yunnan so traditionally Pu'er tea is wrapped in that to protect it from the environment from humidity from everything by having that extra eighth cake though there's seven cakes in the Tong by having that extra eighth cake we can use that as a tester so we have that cake in that kind of limbo state it's not broken up completely and it's also not whole because we're drinking from it occasionally and that's our tester and we drink from it and drink from it and then let's say 15 years pass and we decide you know what this tea's aged enough I'm ready to start enjoying it so we can put the on the shelf we can go into our Tong carefully take out a cake close the Tong back up completely break that cake up put it in a jar and start enjoying it and let's say a year later or two years later we finish that jar of tea and then we still have our tester maybe we want to wait another two years and then we use our tester and taste it and we're like oh it's even better I want to take out another cake and take out another one break it up put it in that jar I could also just replace what was in the jar immediately but the tester is there in that kind of limbo state of like half broken so it's neither good for aging long term and nor for enjoying but it's just there to be able to test so that we know when we would like to remove a cake and break it completely and put it in a jar and the question of what type of jar also was in the comments in the last video which is a really good question we need it for poor a jar that breathes so it's unglazed which means that the clay has to be lead free poor tea needs oxygen and and for both the oxidation and the fermentation of it as it ages and for that purpose of breaking the cake completely and putting in the jar to liven it up is to is to also expose it to a little bit of oxygen so we want the jar to be able to breathe to be porous in general the best clays for storing tea are the same clays that are best for teapots so the best teapots are made of purple sand clay from yixing so the best jars for storing tea are also made of purple sand like this one also you could we use wood fired clay for side handle pots and that type of clay is also really good for tea jars as well so in general whatever clay would make a really good teapot is the same clay that would make a really good jar for storing tea for tea in particular you just want to make sure that it doesn't have too tight of a seal and that it's not glazed so that it will it will breathe one of the issues with doing this with all your cakes breaking them up completely and putting them in a jar and leaving them for a month is that that will take up a lot of space and so you're going to need space for lots of jars which you may not have so an alternative is to get these cardboard pour boxes the ones that we get it in taiwan are made from recycled paper which is first of all good for the environment but the second of all important because it means that the paper has no smell so it won't make the tea smell like cardboard and you can break the whole cake up completely and store it inside of this you could also store your testers in these kinds of boxes but this is an alternative and these can obviously be stacked so you can keep a lot more of them in the same space it's not as good as a ceramic jar but it is an alternative they do breathe a little bit and there is room for a cake inside but a jar will be much much better so to summarize there are two reasons to break up a poor cake completely one is that you might be mindful and keep the leaves more whole which will result in a much better steeping from the beginning of the cake to the end you'll be able to then sort through the cake after it's broken up and get some whole leaves and some little bits and make each pot much more wholesome much more full much more full-bodied from first steeping to last that really is the only reason though to break up a young shangpu completely otherwise there really is no need you could just break it as you go if you're more mindful but I tend to be less mindful and more silly when I do it on the fly and break it more poorly and sometimes that's just not ideal but when a cake is aged it's certainly better to break up the whole thing and let the inside that has been all stuffy and kept away from the air to get some air for about a month and I also gave you two experiments you can do if you can get a hold of the same tea you could store it in a broken half broken cake a fully whole cake a fully broken up cake in a jar and even a Mao Cha loose leaf example of that tea and then after five seven years come test those teas and see how they fare that's a long-term experiment but it's very interesting and helpful and then the other experiment you can do which is much easier is get two cakes of the same tea that's older than five years and break one up completely put it in a nice ceramic jar for a month and leave the other one and then come and start drinking them side by side and you'll see that the one that you've broken up and put in the jar will be much better much smoother much more even. Thank you so much for watching keep the questions coming in the comments and we'll continue to make these videos please visit globalteahut.org and subscribe for our magazine to get content like this and learn more about tea, teaware history, lore, brewing, everything that has to do with tea and also we have some great teas and teaware on our website and all of it is going to support your free tea center and tea farm that we're building where people around the world will be able to come and learn all about tea. Thank you so much.