There is currently no official distinction between ‘cooked’ and ‘raw’ Puer Tea – both qualify as ‘Puer’ – but the last point – ‘sun-dried’ is of some importance. In years past, oven drying, was not uncommon particularly in the rainy season. Even now, smaller outfits in comparatively remote areas typically have a wood fired drying oven which they may possibly use if the weather does not permit sun drying, or if they risk loosing tea that they have made a day or two before because it hasn’t dried sufficiently due to inclement weather. Oven drying lacks any strong historical basis. 

What of course is understood also is that Puer is ‘后发酵/post-fermented‘. This is what makes it different from other teas  and whilst the ‘fermenting’ process of ‘cooked’ tea may continue after it has been wet piled/渥堆, it’s going to change rather less than raw tea, so the ‘post-fermentation’ processes are different.

Apart from raw fruit and vegetables, sun-dried Puer is one of the most natural, least processed products that we might consume. If one can imagine going into the mountains and picking wild vegetables, fruit, etc. taking them home and baking them a little at a low temperature, then drying them outside in the sun (in Xishuangbanna, this takes place in one of China’s remarkably un-polluted, environments with no real industry nearby) and finally processing the crop in some way – slicing, or crushing say, then one has some idea of what goes into the making of loose Puer leaves (mao cha/毛茶).  Inevitably, this minimal intervention – from tree to tea affects the final outcome – the flavour of the tea, the inherent properties of tea.

This regulation has some interesting implications for the Puer market; apart from the labour intensive nature of tea making  –  hand frying, rolling and sorting, which can all be mechanised –  sun-drying has the potential to be a bottle-neck in the production process as most producers have a limited amount of space for sun drying.

Another contentious area is that of ‘Wet Storage’ (cang fang/仓房 /shi cang cha/湿仓茶) – intentionally storing Puer in a place of very high/very high humidity to speed up the fermentation process) which is sometimes depicted as having a long history. Here in Xishuangbanna (sub-tropical) there appears to be no historical evidence of people storing tea in caves or underground in any systematic way in an attempt to hasten ageing. Indeed, there would seem to be little point in doing so since the ambient environment is already humid (around 80% in the wet season) and to store Puer tea in a wetter environment, particularly if there is not good air circulation, risks the tea going mouldy. In the end, this is perhaps a question of taste as there is a school of thought that this kind of cang wei/仓味 tea is a sought after beverage. There is a history of wet storage in Hong Kong and Guang Dong, but it seems likely that this can only be a few hundred years old at most and was perhaps found to be an effective way of ageing some of the early Puer that is talked about here. It seems unlikely to be a good way to age ‘shan tou/山头‘ Puer from single sources.