The common tricks
Dark tea has the deepest fraud market in tea, because the prices are high and verification is hard.
The first trick is the fake vintage, which is the commonest and the most expensive to fall for.
Ripe tea was only standardised in the 1970s, so anything sold as aged ripe from before that is impossible.
The second is the unmarked cake, cheap because nobody will say what it is or where it came from.
The third is surface dressing, with better leaf on the outside of a cake and poorer material inside.
The fourth is the warehouse find, a story told about thousands of ordinary cakes every year.
The fifth is damp storage presented as aged character, which is the hardest one to argue with.
The sixth is the single tree and old arbor claim, which nobody can verify and everybody uses.
The seventh is re-pressing old material into a new cake with a new wrapper and a new date.
All of them are priced off the year, and the year is the one thing you cannot test in a shop.
A 357 gram cake at 7 grams a session is about 50 sessions, which is a lot of money for a printed date.
Why they work
The price of an old cake is mostly the year, and the year is printed on paper by the seller.
A buyer cannot taste the difference between ten and thirty years without a lot of experience.
Damp storage genuinely accelerates the change, so the resulting tea is not simple fakery.
It is real tea that was aged badly, which makes it much harder to argue about.
Cakes are opaque, and breaking one before sale would destroy most of its value.
The old arbor claim has no register and no enforcement, so it is free to make.
Warehouse stories flatter the buyer, and flattered buyers ask fewer questions.
Prices rose so far and so fast that faking became more profitable than selling honestly.
The supply chain is long, and most sellers genuinely do not know the full history either.
Which is why the defence is mostly about who you buy from rather than what you look at.
Defence
Buy from a seller who has traded for years and can say where a cake was stored.
Ask for the factory and the recipe number, since those are documented and the year is not.
Sample before you buy a whole cake, and sample from that cake rather than from a different one.
Break the cake when you get it and compare the interior with the surface.
Smell at the break for mustiness, which is the signature of damp storage rather than of age.
Buy ripe tea for drinking and raw tea for keeping, and do not cross the two over.
Be more careful with ripe tea sold as old than with anything else in the category.
Ignore single tree claims unless a garden and a survey year come with them.
Keep the wrapper, the invoice and a note of the price together, permanently.
Compare the same recipe at two different years from one seller, which is the only real lesson.
Three cakes of one recipe, opened at two, five and ten years, show you what the years actually did.
When in doubt
When you cannot verify the age, pay the young price, because a young cake is what it is.
An unmarked cake is worth the ripe tea price and not a penny above it.
A story about a warehouse is a reason to leave rather than a reason to buy.
Buy young from a documented factory and keep it yourself, which is verifiable but slower.
Do not buy old ripe tea at any price, since the category did not exist before the 1970s.
Buy one cake, open it, and only then decide whether to buy more from that seller.
Ask what the seller has personally drunk from the same batch, and wait for the answer.
Prefer boring. A plain factory cake with a printed recipe beats an interesting one with a story.
There is always more dark tea, and no single cake is worth buying on faith.
In this category, doubt is not caution, it is the correct price.
Ripe tea was standardised in the 1970s, so no cake can honestly be older than about fifty years.