A cup of Pu'erh.

Last year, thanks to several outstanding blogs (and to several outstanding sources),  I was able to effectively reduce my cholesterol level.  Perhaps it was my very kind (and immensely patient and understanding) physician's treatments, but I am going to credit this particular success to tea.  I don't think I will be rescinding that decision anytime soon.


It has been stated - in many and varied locations - that "green tea reduces cholesterol".  My personal experiments have taken me into a rather laughable but nevertheless quite enjoyable series of adventures in search of curative properties of drinks - yes, that includes alcoholic beverages.But this is about tea - a specific tea called Pu'erh (or variously spelled puer, bo-nay, etc depending on who you are talking with).  This tea is a product of the western Chinese province of Yunnan (near the Burmese/Thai borders) and in the world of teas, is considered a totally different class of its own (the other classes being black, oolong, green, white, tisanes, etc.). And Pu'erh (pronounced 'poe-arh' in Mandarin Chinese) is the grandaddy of cholesterol reducers.

This tea is mostly packaged and sold in "bing" which is the Chinese word for a disk, and the disk (the tea is pressed into a round disk and placed in a paper wrapper) looks like this:

Other available forms are in rectangular blocks (with or without Chinese characters pressed on thir surfaces), in various shapes and sizes depending on the material used for outer wrapping - such as bamboo stems, bamboo leaves, dried out grapefruit or other fruits, smaller disks, half-ball disks (called 'tuo's) and so on ....all the way to your everyday ordinary loose leaf variety.  Here is one of my favorites, a block wrapped in bamboo leaf:

And when unwrapped, the above block reveals the pressed block of tea inside:

There are so many other places on the net which discuss the details of Pu'erh, that I am not going to take up even more space saying the same things.  Instead, I will be writing about personal experiences which I have learned from actually drinking this tea - now going on to three years in earnest.

For purposes of this post and following ones on tea, though, here is a tiny bit of background:
Pu'erh comes in two types: 'green' and 'cooked' (some authorities call this latter type by other names such as 'ripe', 'aged', etc., but I am going to use the term that is more meaningful to me in this blog). The block shown above is the cooked variety - it produces a brew whose color is more familiar to us. Apparently, the Chinese have a saying that one is supposed to drink the green type in warm/hot weather and the cooked type in cold weather.  I suppose that is why the monks of Tibet consume massive quantities of the cooked stuff - almost exclusively, I think.  The most overused phrase about pu'erh is that it is 'like wine' (which, as a wine collector, I find rather untrue - later on that).  This is because pu'erh, unlike most other teas, ages over significant periods of time and increases in value as it ages.  Most of the good stuff does anyway.  Some significantly more than others.  There are stories of disks changing hands for several thousand US Dollars (or maybe more).  I am personally aware of prices being in the hundreds of dollars per disk!  If things are to age - they need an inception date.  And this is one of the things about good pu'erh - it will have a date (such as 'Spring 1945') on it or in its record somewhere.  This date is not necessarily when the tea was picked from the tree but may be the date when it was processed, with the actual age of the leaves being somewhat older.  Sometimes by decades.

For now, suffice it to say that the cholesterol numbers have not lied.

Here's to your health!