What this encyclopedia is for
puerh.app exists to fix a specific problem. The English-language internet on pu-erh is fragmented across two-decade-old forum threads, vendor catalogs with conflicting claims, and a handful of dedicated bloggers who have moved on. Chinese-language sources are more rigorous but inaccessible to most readers, and the standards themselves — GB/T 22111-2008 for Pǔ’ěr chá geographic indication, GB/T 22291-2017 for white tea by extension — are rarely cited in plain prose. We sit in that gap.
Our editorial scope is narrow on purpose. We cover only Chinese pu-erh and the immediately adjacent post-fermented categories that share processing logic — liù bǎo (六堡), Hunan fú zhuān (茯砖), and a few border teas from northern Laos and Myanmar that were historically traded through Yiwu and Menghai. We do not cover matcha, masala chai, Darjeeling, or Japanese sencha as primary subjects. Comparative paragraphs appear where they clarify processing or chemistry, never as listicle filler.
Every factual claim — a factory founding date, a cultivar’s leaf-area index, a fermentation temperature curve — is sourced. Our preferred citations are, in order: Chinese national and provincial standards (GB/T, DB53 Yunnan provincial), peer-reviewed papers from the Journal of Tea Science (Chá Yè Kē Xué 茶叶科学) and journals indexed in CNKI, on-record interviews with named tea makers, and finally vendor catalogs when no better source exists. We mark the last category clearly. If a claim is contested — and many pu-erh claims are, particularly around the early wò duī (渥堆) experiments at Kunming Tea Factory in 1973-1975 — we present both readings and name the disagreement.
We are also explicit about what we cannot know. The boundary between a 1999 Yiwu and a 2003 Yiwu, in a sealed tǒng (筒) of unverified provenance, is not knowable from cupping alone. We say so. A cake described as “early Mahei” without a specific maker is a vendor narrative, not a fact, and we treat it that way.
The encyclopedia is free, ad-free, and updated continuously. Corrections from readers with primary sources are welcomed and credited in the changelog at the bottom of each article.
How the project started
puerh.app began in late 2022 as an internal reference document. The Teamotea operations team needed a single place to record which Menghai-area producers we had visited, what cultivars were on each mountain, and what the fermentation logs looked like at three partner wò duī facilities we were sampling for shop.puerh.app. The document grew past four hundred pages. By spring 2023 it was clear that most of what we had compiled — factory histories, regional GI boundaries from GB/T 22111-2008, cultivar notes on Měnghǎi dà yè zhǒng (勐海大叶种) and the Jǐng Mài (景迈) ancient gardens — did not exist in English in any consolidated form.
We rebuilt the internal wiki as a public encyclopedia. The catalog of roughly fifty teas reflects what we have personally tasted, weighed, brewed under controlled parameters (5 g / 100 ml gaiwan, 95 °C, recorded infusion times), and in most cases traced back to a named producer. The producer profiles at /producers cover twenty factories we have either visited or corresponded with directly between 2019 and 2024.
Editorial principles
We write in sentence case, with em-dashes for asides and pinyin in italics with tone marks. Pǔ’ěr (普洱) is two syllables, not “puer” or “pu’er,” and the apostrophe matters — it disambiguates the syllable break before a vowel. We do not use exclamation marks. We do not use the words “journey,” “experience,” or “liquid gold.”
Each tea page carries one sensory paragraph from a named taster, not a composite. If Evgeniy Smoley tasted a 2008 Xiaguan tiě bǐng (铁饼) on 14 March 2024 and recorded camphor, wet sandalwood, and a metallic finish on the seventh infusion, that is what the page says, with the date. We do not aggregate notes across tasters and present them as consensus. Disagreement between two tasters on the same cake is shown as two separate entries.
Producer pages list founding year, registered address, current GB/T certification status where verifiable, and any name changes — Menghai Tea Factory’s 2004 privatization being the obvious example. We link out to chá yè jì shù (茶叶技术) literature on CNKI where readers can verify processing claims.
Sourcing and transparency
The encyclopedia is editorially separate from shop.puerh.app, the commercial sister site. Catalog entries on puerh.app are not promotions — a tea is included because it is representative of its category, regardless of whether the shop carries it. Roughly sixty percent of catalog teas are not currently sold by us. When a tea is both encyclopedia subject and shop product, the page carries a clear disclosure at the top and the price block is rendered by a separate component.
For sourcing of physical samples used in tasting notes, we record: producer, intermediary (if any), purchase date, purchase venue (Fangcun market stall number where applicable, or named online vendor), and lot or batch number. Provenance uncertainty above a threshold — for example, vintage claims older than fifteen years without sealed tǒng documentation — disqualifies a tea from the catalog’s dated-tasting section, though it may still appear in the comparison archive marked as such.
We accept no payment for inclusion, no advertising, and no sponsored placements. The project is funded by Teamotea operations as part of the broader THETEA constellation.