https://www.pageoftea.com/fake-puer
Now the article claims that this will happen to me:
So I guess soon I will be banned or replaced by a botvery important ! ….If you feel like to share this article with others on some Tea Forum , please do not share it by “copy-paste” method , you will just get your self banned , as we did! Find a smart way how to pass the “message”.
Here are some spicy nuggets:
...you can not entirely rely on your knowledge of the wrappers since faking those has been mastered many moons ago and reached the level as fa as making it eaten by worms so it look authentic old. Just simply sprinkle with 米浆 (rice milk) , wrap it in kitchen foil but the way that ants and worms still can get in and they’ll do the job:-D
The very common and most convenient for sellers is to sell loose shu or sheng pu-erh where the complexity of faking the label doesn’t exist. Just need to put into some bamboo basket and claim the date of your liking. Various techniques are applied as light fermentation for the old shengs or the excessive wet storage for shu puerh. There are also variations / combinations of changing environment from wet to dry or vice versa.
Few factors is good to consider before you make any 20+ years old loose tea. It is not convenient to store big amounts of sheng puerh because big leafs taking lots of space and during the time they are also braking into smaller pieces ( mainly pieces at the bottom of the box ) . Shu pu-erh is made for consumption not for aging and getting 30 or something years old shu pu-erh is very rare these days ( might change in next generation because massive production might not be compensate by demand ) . Legit tea like this , is not sold to someone for few CNY , yet I would be skeptical that any foreigner just come alone and buy it on tea market , then claim “I’ve got it from the trusted source” . Be vigilant to those claims! It is part of the marketing.
Not only the age but also the grade faking can be as far as inventive like mixing very old / unwanted black tea Jin Si ( known as golden tips ) with some cheap grade of shu puerh and pressing it together to make it look like high grade of shu pu-erh called “Gong Ting” . Using few years old Liu Bao tea and pack it as 40y old sheng pu-erh. These kind of things you are not going to hear from your favorite vendor’s Youtube channel neither on some Pu-erh club on social media like Facebook , where any scandals around the tea are not welcomed ( we got burned few times already, so talking from personal experience ) .
One tea , many labels is the well know concept coming from the place called “ba gong li” ( 8 kilometers ) , which stands for being located 8km from Menghai. Very common processing of very cheap grade of pu-erh tea when mixture of various areas teas or cheap bush tea brought from Lincang area, is pressed into the cakes, brigs ,.etc. , then wrapped into the various labels with different names of the places like Yiwu, Bingdao, Laobangzhan ..etc. These are ending up on Tao Bao or some small vendors on the street sold from 20 – 300 CNY per piece. So far not many foreigners are interested into this concept ( we only know few Russians ) , but if you choose to do this concept from one single batch , you need to separate the tea and store those different labels for some time in different places in order to achieve different taste ( so your Bingdao is not exactly the same as your Laobangzhan ) . In China is proceeded by separating those labels in different provinces with different climate, like Kunming , Guangzhou etc. Experienced pu-erh drinker will spot that something is not right , but honestly…how many experienced pu-erh tea drinkers are out there?
Very common way of faking the Gu Shu is to leave long stems on bush tea with big leafs.
There is lot’s of going on especially on FB tea groups. Random people offering or even just show off the 1000 years old Gu Shu or as far as 60 years old whatever tea, hoping to get some “buy” requests.
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It is very hard to determine which one is real and you can rely only on good reputation of the seller in that group ( unless the group is made by the seller him/her self;)
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So why is some people offering those kind of teas to foreigners? Pretty simple. In China this “fake tea” issue is know already for many years , it has been mentioned in news, papers, local social medias. So people are generally more cautious and don’t go for it anymore , rather chose the taste of the tea. As most of the pu-erh tea drinkers in China who drink pu-erh at least 1 year, they do recognize what they like or not ( which is very different form pu-erh market abroad ) . So sales for those fake teas are dropping down and some smart vendors are trying luck abroad, because foreigners are still known for being easily cheated in that matter. There is plenty of it popping out these days ( like mushrooms after rain ) from Taiwan, Malaysia etc., where is very good environment for fast maturing ( more in Tea Storage article ) .
