How will Trump’s tariffs affect the tea world?

Kombucha puer + the uncertain future of Chinese tea imports.

Tea made from tea made from tea

The tea: Kombu Pu ripe puer, sold by Path of Cha. $25 for 100g.

I tend not to love kombucha or ripe puer, so it’s with happy surprise that I share this tea with you. Path of Cha’s Kombu Pu is a neat experimental batch where the puer leaves were ripened with the aid of kombucha, which itself was fermented from puer tea. The result is a tasty and affordable brew with a surprising Jolly Rancher sweetness. I don’t know if the kombucha makes Kombu Pu any more of a digestive aid than a typical ripe puer, but I can say it’s a well structured tea that lasts through eight or more steeps.

Ripe (shou) puer—as distinct from raw (sheng) puer—is a style that emerged in the 1970s in response to growing demand for aged puer tea. Traditional raw puer can take decades to mature. The accelerated fermentation of ripe puer occurs in months. Puer is ripened in a manner similar to composting. Factory workers make large piles of raw puer leaves—we’re talking hundreds or thousands of pounds—and moisten them with water. A controlled microclimate plus the biomass of the tea raises the temperature within the piles, causing bacteria, fungi, and oxidative enzymes to speedrun their fermentation activity. Ripened puer rarely has the complexity of a well aged raw puer, but you can make a lot of it taste pretty good pretty quickly, which is nothing to sneeze at.

The source: Misha Gulko is the tea seller behind my recent fascination with yellow tea. At Path of Cha in Brooklyn, he and two staffers source a small but surprisingly wide-reaching selection of teas from China, Taiwan, and Japan. Misha says the Kombu Pu project began with a suggestion from a customer. He then pitched the idea to one of his partners in Yunnan. Instead of moistening the tea-ripening piles with plain water, they used kombucha instead. The effect on the finished tea is subtle, mostly emerging through a sweet-and-sour juiciness that uplifts the brawny Bulang mountain leaf material.

The steamy seduction of yellow tea

To brew: Just about any ripe puer worth its pile should be bombproof to drink. These teas don’t really get bitter with prolonged steeping, just stronger, so your choice of brewing method is up to you. Kombu Pu thrives in an 80 milliliter gaiwan with 5 grams of tea (1g/16ml), full boiling water, and brew times that begin at 20 seconds. This approach highlights the tea’s balanced character and best reveals the kombucha’s involvement. For a fuller dose of fungal funk, steep a chunk of leaves all day in a thermos. The brew will taste as robust as a cup of diner coffee, but with an inky, velvety richness.

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Tea is caught in the middle of Trump’s colossally stupid trade war

It’s been a hell of a month this past week, and tea sellers are feeling the squeeze. Here’s a timeline of recent events.

February 1st: As threats of tariffs against Canada and Mexico stall, the president announces a 10% tariff on Chinese imports. Unlike Trump’s tariffs against China during his first term, the new taxes also apply to imports under $800. This previous exemption to duties on low cost imports was called the de minimus exemption.

February 4th: Tariffs against China take effect. In turn, China sets retaliatory tariffs on American natural resources and machinery. Later that day, the Unites States Postal Service announces that it will temporarily not accept shipments from China and Hong Kong.

February 5th: On the day the USPS hold was supposed to go into effect, the service reverses their decision, once again accepting packages from China and Hong Kong.