Pu-erh tea, also spelled puer (pǔʼěrchá 普洱茶), is a specific style of Chinese tea. Pu-erh tea can only come from Yunnan, and can only be made from large-leaf varietal (Dà Yè Zhǒng 大叶种) Camellia Sinensis Assamica tea trees.

More than anywhere else, we'd argue Yunnan has the most ecologically appealing tea resources. Surprisingly large amounts of old-growth, genetically diverse tea trees can be found throughout the forests and mountainsides of Yunnan; all free from agricultural intervention. The most sought after tea comes from these types of growing environments, rather than commercial plantations.

Given the limited supply of, and widespread demand for pu-erh tea, there's a correspondingly expensive, competitive, and complex market for it — both domestically in China, and internationally. It also happens to be the kind of tea we enjoy drinking, and the only kind we make.

We usually spend the two main tea production seasons (spring and autumn) in Xishuangbanna; one of the main tea producing prefectures. In the grand scheme of the tea world, people like us are irrelevant. Us 'Westerners' are not, in fact, the primary consumers of pu-erh tea — imagine that! But, like everyone else who wants to make good tea, we head to Yunnan and compete in the seasonal frenzy.

Processing pu-erh tea is relatively uncomplicated compared to some other styles of Chinese tea, but there's a huge amount of nuance, skill, and just straight up hard physical labour involved — everything is done by hand.

First off, picking leaves often involves climbing large tea trees, sometimes several metres tall. Once the leaves are picked, the clock starts ticking to process them before they wither and oxidise. After picking comes the 'killing green' (shāqīng 杀青) stage in which thousands of leaves are tossed in a wok over a fire. As shown above, fresh leaves are fried by hand as this allows for superior control than machine roasting.

Critically, pu-erh tea has to be dried in the sun, as opposed to mechanically. Sun-drying (shàigān 晒干) is weather dependent, requires a lot of space, and extra work. Without it, pu-erh tea would lose one of its most unique characteristics; the ability to age and improve over the years under appropriate storage conditions.

As with many things worth doing, pu-erh tea production is a time-sensitive, laborious, and financially costly undertaking. And because no good deed goes unpunished (and there's no such thing as too much tea) we also produce Yunnan white tea, such as the famous 'Moonlight White' style (Yuè Guāng Bái 月光白), as well as black teas such as 'Yunnan Gold' (diānhóng 滇红).

As a 'company', we sit in a delicate spot best summed up by two extremes that we feel are the usual approach.

On the one hand, oriental fetishism, exoticism, mystique, and plain old colonial strip-mining of othered cultures. This is often accompanied by imagery and language like 'authentic', 'ancient' and 'traditional'. On the other hand, the classic 'Western' cultural supremacy approach of paving over everything with fascism, simplification (i.e. reductionism), removing every piece of cultural nuance except the bits that look nice, which are readily appropriated, because 'we know best!'. 

For us, both of these approaches are misleading at best and actively exploitative at worst. So why bother starting KUURA in the first place? Because it was very hard, and occasionally impossible, to find the exact kinds of tea we liked in both the Western and Chinese markets. Most old-growth, forest tea material doesn't really make it to the 'open market' (i.e public facing retail outlets) to begin with and even if it does, it's extremely difficult to verify, and of course becomes even more expensive.

So, on a purely selfish level, we started sourcing and pressing our own teas. It's a practical solution to an expensive habit: securing high-quality teas that we enjoy, at a price we can afford, and sharing them with you.