For some new tea drinkers, lacking knowledge of how to distinguish good from bad Pu'er tea often leads to purchasing very low-quality tea. Let's quickly learn about the common tricks used by dishonest merchants when selling Pu'er tea.
1. Surface tea and wrapped-edge tea: This type of tea, as the name suggests, contains poor-quality tea or tea dust inside, while the outside is covered with thick, robust tea leaves. Sometimes, wrapping the edges makes it appear hand-pressed, but it is actually machine-pressed. Such tea is essentially worthless but is often sold at high prices.
2. Pu'er tea is graded into different levels. Some merchants use sweet talk and deception to take advantage of new tea drinkers, selling low-grade tea at high prices. If a tea shop owner you are unfamiliar with keeps praising you, be cautious—they may be planning to overcharge you.
3. Wet storage tea posing as dry storage tea: Many merchants use wet storage methods to repeatedly pile and ferment new tea, simulating accelerated aging to pass it off as naturally fermented tea. Such tea emits a pungent, moldy smell, lacks aroma, tastes bland and watery, but its liquor color resembles that of aged tea.
4. New tea disguised as aged tea: Some unscrupulous merchants use raw materials unsuitable for tea making and process them through various methods to mimic aged tea, tricking people into buying. Worse still, you might even think the merchant is kind and buy in bulk.
5. Recycled Pu'er tea: Also known as "reheated" Pu'er tea, some merchants buy tea from well-known manufacturers, disassemble it, use inferior tea as the core, and wrap it with the manufacturer's tea leaves to pass it off as genuine high-quality tea.
6. Repackaged Pu'er tea: This involves using fake packaging to sell tea of a different grade as authentic brand-name tea. This is common on platforms like Taobao, so consumers should stay vigilant.
7. The most unacceptable trick is selling moldy Pu'er tea to new tea drinkers. Some merchants, with a "catch as catch can" attitude, claim white mold is "frost" and sell it as aged tea. In reality, such tea is undrinkable. Similarly, some merchants pass off terrace-grown tea as ancient tree Pu'er tea by processing the sun-dried material into large, beautiful tea cakes to deceive inexperienced buyers.