Why Reprocessed tea goes bad
Reprocessed tea is not one thing, and that is the whole problem with storing it. The category covers two products with opposite needs. Scented teas (jasmine above all) are a finished tea carrying a volatile flower aroma that starts leaving the day it is made. Compressed and aged teas, pu-erh most notably, are the opposite: they are meant to change slowly over years.
So ‘going bad’ means completely different things depending on which you are holding. Scented tea goes bad when the scent goes. Aged tea goes bad when the wrong microbes, or too much water, get involved.
Check which one you have before you decide where to put it.
Moisture is the fastest killer
For scented teas, moisture ruins the base leaf and kills what is left of the aroma at the same time; the tea ends up smelling damp and faintly sour instead of floral. For compressed aged teas, water is the main lever on how they age. Too dry and nothing happens, too wet and you get mould, or the flat, musty taint of bad wet storage.
A practical target for aged cakes is around 60–70% relative humidity with some air exchange: in the wrapper, loosely enclosed, not vacuum-sealed. For scented tea, keep it dry and sealed, well under 60%.
If you see coloured bloom, or the tea smells mouldy rather than earthy, discard it. Rinsing will not make it safe.
Odor travels
Both halves of this category are odour problems. Scented tea is literally made by absorbing aroma, so it will go on absorbing whatever is next to it. A jasmine tea stored near spices is ruined in a way you cannot undo. Aged compressed teas are worse, because they are stored for years and their own aroma is low and earthy, so a foreign smell blends in and stays for as long as you own the cake.
Keep both in clean, odour-free, ventilated space. Do not store scented tea beside aged tea, and do not store either beside roasted oolongs.
A light taint can sometimes be aired out. A strong one is permanent.
Heat and light cook it slowly
Scented teas lose aroma fastest to heat and time, and light speeds it along. The base leaf often stays perfectly drinkable long after the jasmine has gone, which is why old scented tea tastes like ordinary green tea rather than like spoiled tea.
Aged compressed teas want nearly the opposite: a stable, moderate temperature around 20–30°C, dark, with air exchange.
Do not refrigerate either. The cold does nothing for a cake that needs to age, and the condensation when you take a sealed tin out of the fridge will wreck a scented tea. Stability is what both want; only the target differs.
The habit that prevents all three
Sort first, store second. Scented teas go in a sealed tin in a cool, dark, dry cupboard, bought in small quantities and drunk within months. The scent is the product and it has a short clock.
Cakes go in their wrapper, loosely enclosed, in a clean dark cupboard at stable temperature, away from odours, with the year written on the wrapper. Check them once or twice a year by smelling the dry tea: clean and earthy is healthy ageing, mouldy or sour is not.
And keep the two halves of this category apart. Almost every storage mistake with reprocessed tea comes from treating one as if it were the other.
One more distinction inside the aged half: raw (sheng) and ripe (shou) pu-erh are not stored identically in practice, whatever the label says. Ripe pu-erh has already been through accelerated fermentation, so it is comparatively stable. It mostly needs to be kept clean, dry, and away from odours, and it will soften rather than transform. Raw pu-erh is the tea that genuinely changes over decades, and the one most easily ruined by damp or by being sealed away from air entirely. If you are laying tea down, know which you have: the storage that suits a ripe cake will quietly stall a raw one. It is the single distinction most worth learning before you buy a cake to keep.
A cake stored well is not a better cake, only a more predictable one. Buy on how it tastes now, and treat 10 years of age as a separate gamble.