Dark Tea Buying Guide

Dark tea is the category where collecting is the point for most buyers, and that is exactly why it needs the most discipline.

A ripe cake or brick is affordable, drinks well today and needs nothing from the recipient except a kettle .

Aged pu-erh is sold by year, and the year is the single biggest driver of price. A 1990s cake and a 2015 cake differ by a factor of 10 or more.

Decide first between ripe and raw, because they are not versions of the same thing. Ripe is fermented over weeks and drunk now, raw is aged over years.

A shop that has held a cake for ten years can tell you where it was kept, and that is the whole value of an old cake.

Dark tea is the one category where price and quality genuinely track each other, but only if you avoid the aged market entirely.