Two different purchases
Dark tea is the category where collecting is the point for most buyers, and that is exactly why it needs the most discipline.
Ripe tea is fermented and ready to drink the day it is pressed. Raw tea is not finished, and it changes over decades.
A daily dark tea is a ripe brick or a loose ripe tea, cheap and forgiving, drunk now.
A collected dark tea is a raw cake bought young and kept, and it is a genuinely long-term commitment.
The two are made in the same factories, sold in the same shops and described in the same language, which is where the confusion starts.
Work out which one you want before you spend anything, because the prices differ by a wide margin and the waiting periods differ by decades.
If you have never drunk well aged raw dark tea, find some before you buy any. Everything else depends on knowing what the target tastes like.
Decide too whether you have anywhere to keep raw cakes. They need air, space and a decade, and a flat with one cupboard has none of those.
For daily drinking
Buy ripe. It is the cheapest good tea in any shop, and it is the most tolerant of a careless brew.
A 250 gram factory brick costs little and gives 30 to 40 sessions at 7 grams, and it keeps for years without any fuss.
Rinse it once with boiling water and discard that infusion. It wakes the leaf up and washes off the storage.
Ripe tea is also the best tea for a thermos or a long morning at a desk, because it does not turn bitter when it sits.
Buy two or three factories and stay with them. Ripe tea has a house character, and you will prefer one.
Avoid anything sold as old ripe tea at a premium. Ripe tea was standardised in the 1970s, and the old-cake market is where the fakes are.
Fu brick and liubao are worth trying in this slot too, and both are cheaper than the pu-erh most people default to.
Brew ripe tea at 7 grams per 150ml with a full boil. Under-dosed ripe tea tastes thin, which is why people think they dislike it.
For collecting
Buy raw, buy young, buy from a documented factory recipe, and then leave it alone for ten years.
The two variables that decide the outcome are the base leaf and the storage, and the first of those is fixed before you ever see the cake.
That is why the factory matters more than the vintage. A good recipe from a good factory produces drinkable tea in almost any year.
Storage wants humidity around 60 to 70 per cent, a stable temperature, and air that moves without a draft. Guangdong and Kunming storage give different results.
Do not seal raw cakes in plastic. They need to breathe, and a cake sealed for ten years has not aged, it has simply sat there.
Buy three or six of one cake rather than six different cakes. A vertical of one recipe teaches you more than a shelf of unrelated ones.
Drink one of every three you buy within the first two years. It is the only way to know what you are actually keeping.
Write down the humidity in the room once a month. Two years of that record tells you more about your storage than any description.
How to split your budget
Fifty-fifty is defensible here in a way it is not in other categories, because both halves are real products.
A ripe brick every few months for drinking, and one or two raw cakes a year put aside, is a workable pattern.
Set a fixed annual figure for the raw cakes and hold it. The category is very good at making each purchase feel like the last one.
Spend the first two years buying ripe tea and drinking other people’s aged raw tea. That is the cheapest education available.
Keep a written record of every cake: factory, recipe, year, price, where it is stored. Without it you have a pile of anonymous discs.
Open one cake a year from the oldest thing you have, whatever the books say about optimal windows.
If you have not opened anything in three years, you are not collecting dark tea, you are storing cardboard. Drink some this week.
Buy ripe tea from the same factory as the raw cakes you keep. If the house style does not suit you, you will not want the aged version either.