My pu-er jar

This week, I bought this yixing purple sand clay jar (15 cm high, 560 gram, baked at over 1200 degrees) from the same producer who made the zhuni teapots. He's a good friend of Teaparker, which helped me to get introduced. He is also a major player in the fine Chinese tea market. His basement looks like a museum. Half of the shelves are not his own products, but ancient potteries he's collecting! Song, Tang, Yuan dynasty... He says many of his guests spend hours going through his collection. I can't wait to go there again!.

No wonder his works are of such classical and simple Chinese design! This one has only the word 'Cha' carved on top. But others with calligraphy and paintings (see post below) are also available. I bought this jar for my flaked Jiang Cheng puer. It will help improve it further. Old teas need a little air and humidity coming through the pores of the yixing clay to continue their postfermentation at a slow pace. And for pressed puer it is even more important. It needs to be flaked in advance of brewing. If not, you may get some off flavors that were trapped inside the tea and that didn't have time to go away.

And then there is the concentrated pu-er flavor coming out of the jar! Hummm...