What /is/ Dark Tea? An open discussion about tea naming

[Youzi]

Laos Heicha, --
The problem is that Pu'er processing is not that special. Probably many other Heicha producing regions make their tea similarly.

My understanding is that heicha is very varied category, only common denominator is some kind of microbiological fermentation (and young shengpu sort of conflicts that already). Laos pu'er makes it very clear what kind of tea is being made. Afaik all heichas are rather specific, and not that similar to pu'er tea. Liubao, Ancha, Hunan heicha.. All those are really far from each other processing wise.
Basically I think that using 'heicha' to mean pu'er-like tea produced tea outside Yunnan is misleading, all other heichas have their own traditions, cultivars, processing methods.. To use 'heicha' to mean non-yunnanese pu'er takes away some of all that.
Laos pu'er doesn't have separate history or tradition – it is same tea as Yunnan pu'er, there's just a country border in between. So calling it "laos pu'er" tells customer everything they need to understand the tea.

Depends on your definition of Heicha. If you define Heicha as any tea, that is intentionally fermented, or made to be fermented, then Pu'er is a Heicha. Shu is obvious, in the case of Sheng the fermentation period is longer (years). If you look how older sheng was made, young sheng was made undrinkable, and was meant to be aged and not consumed right away. Otherwise Young sheng would be sun dried green tea.

It's only nowadays that young sheng is started to be consumed in its green stage, because not many vendors can offer aged sheng besides the big and old factories.

They could just call it Laos Tea, Pu'er Style Laos Tea. To be honest Laos and the regions around Yunnan is not the problem here. The problem is vendors calling everything XXX Pu'er Just because it's pressed, when it's not even made from tea from the Yunnan Regions, and wasn't even made like Pu'er. Speaking of vendors who sell Pu'er White tea, from Fujian... At Least Laos tea was made from the same kind of tea and the same way as Pu'er. So a classification like Zhengyan and Banyan (like with yancha) would be great in this sense, separating the location of the origin and the processing.