PU ER Tea

PU ER Tea, originally uploaded by www.nataliebehring.com.

Aged Pu Er tea is sampled by a customer in a tea shop in Beijing. Until recently, pu'er tea was seen as a cheap drink, mainly because the leaves could be easily stored in bricks or cakes for long periods of time. Then, in the 1990s, it began to be collected in southern China, and now the fashion has swept over northern China, pushing up the market prices to extraordinary levels. Retail shops and tea-tasting clubs are sprouting up all over the country.