SpotOfTea said

Does anyone know how YunnanSourcing stores their loose tea?

I’m afraid to ask on their official website because I’m worried they would just lie or just not tell me the full truth. I was wondering if anyone knows how Yunnan Sourcing com and us sites store their loose teas. Particularly the green teas and teas that don’t stay fresh for too long. I tried the laoshan pine needles green tea in April and it was super sweet and umami. It was the spring 2021 harvest. I got the same 2021 spring harvest again in may/june (100 grams) and it’s just not the same as it was in april. It’s not quite as sweet and instead of using 4.5 grams, I’m now using 5 grams. It still has the same general flavor profile but it tastes almost like water using 4.5 grams. Doesn’t have the same top notes like it did in april and there is no hui gan. I do gongfu using 100ml water at 175 for this particular green, doing 10 seconds, 20, 30, 45, 60, and 90 seconds. I wish I waited longer to get the 2022 harvest but I was told by their chat system that they “didn’t think” they were getting more so I was kinda duped into getting it. So is there anyone who can answer my question? Did I purchase year-old-almost-going-stale tea? I know there’s a thread somewhere on this websites that questions the way their store their puer teas. Just something about this company doesn’t really seem trustworthy.

All my others teas that I ordered in that same shipment were all from the current 2022 harvest and they all taste fine. So I know there’s something fishy (no pun intended) about the way they store their loose teas.

3 Replies

I haven’t ordered from YS in years, BUT with my last order, for some reason I imagined YS and only YS specifically (no other tea companies) just storing their teas in barrels with a ton of air in them… could just be my imagination though.

I will clarify… because with my order years ago, I noticed they had a specific tea from a specific harvest year that I wanted to get. It was a YEARS old black tea. I was surprised they were still selling it. Obviously I wasn’t expecting fresh tea but wanted the same harvest. I appreciate that YS sells older harvests but ALSO appreciate that they specify which year the harvests are from. On that specific tea I ordered, the exact same year harvests tasted nothing like the same harvest I still had, so I started to wonder how they were storing their teas if there was such a difference in the flavor in what was supposed to be the exact same tea.

SpotOfTea said

Yeah, a lot of the oolongs and black teas sold on taiwan sourcing are all from several years ago. The packs that are vacuum sealed are fresh. The bags that are just loose and have air in them, are not fresh. When I say “fresh” I don’t mean freshly picked. What I mean is that it has been stored good enough to not allow it to oxidize. Leaving tea refrigerated with AIR inside of the container is a really good way to get tea to OXIDIZE pretty fast.

As for black teas, I tried the 2019 Citrus Night black tea last year. I liked it so much that I bought more this year. Well, now the same tea doesn’t have the same citrus notes anymore. Some people think you can “age” black tea. Well guess what, black tea doesn’t “age” it just loses its antioxidant properties which is why the flavor changes. If you want tea that AGES then you need to get puer and store it correctly. White tea ages too but you have to wait more than 10 years.
I know a lot of tea snobs are against refrigerating their tea but in my experience, it really does preserve the antioxidants, amino acids, and everything else that makes tea taste good. I’ve done side by side tests. I kept some darjeeling and some assam out in a tin on the counter and I left the same tea in the fridge in a bag, removing as much air as possible. After 6 months, the tea that was left out was stale, lost its top notes, and wasn’t the same. The tea that I had in the fridge still had all of its top note flavors intact. So whoever says tea should stay out of the fridge really doesn’t know anything about science or biochemistry or anything like that. There’s even been studies showing that tea keeps its flavor better when it’s kept refrigerated. I did read one scientific study that stated tea kept in the fridge has all of its antioxidant contents intact. The tea they left outside of the fridge lost about 28% of its antioxidant content and it did affect the flavor. This particular study was done using simple home methods because they wanted the test to be as simple as possible.

I do know that yuuki-cha, the vendor I get my japanese teas from, they do refrigerate their teas and I’ve NEVER gotten stale tea from them. I’ve had teas that were not my favorites but nothing about them were bad and they definitely weren’t stale or anything.

I would imagine yunnan sourcing keeps their loose teas in some sort of container with free moving AIR inside.

There was also a reddit thread about how Scott told someone that “we aren’t in the business of puer storage” when asked about their aging and storage technique. Well, that’s funny, because PROPERLY STORED PUER tea takes into account proper AGING. Scott basically stated that it’s a warehouse for selling tea, not aging tea. That would explain why the us site always has dried out puer. I used to really like Scott but after reading some things about him, he seems really pompous and is too cheap to get refrigerated storage and humidity storage. Most of the teas on YS and TW are honestly junk. There are like a handful of really good decent teas.

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