Tea life in Norway – Winter is coming

Do you drink sheng puerh tea? If so, you're likely to have a few different cakes and samples laying around, or you might even be a sheng fanatic like me. For some people, a decent collection might take form after a few years of investing in new (and sometimes old) teas.You might also have read stuff online about how you should store these, what you could call, oversensitive teas. In this short article I'll try to explain the sheng situation here in Norway and how I try to take care of my small, but growing puerh collection.

As many of you probably know, sheng puerh reacts to almost everything; sunlight, smells, temperature, as well as humidity level. There are tons of articles and blog posts online on how to store your tea in order to protect and age it further. I've read some of them and have also received tips from more experienced tea friends, but I'm definitely not an expert on the topic. Still, I would claim that I've found a way to store sheng puerh teas in a cold, harsh place, like my country of Norway.

There are a lot of good things to say about Norway, but the winters here are cold. Really cold. If you live in a country with more forgiving temperatures and weather you might not recognize the issues I address in this article. I would also say you're very lucky. What you're about to read is definitely not a guide, but more like me trying to explain the issues I have with tea storage in my home country and how I have tried to deal with them.

Let me try to describe how sheng puerh works here. During winter there is no use of brewing it at all because I only end up wasting the leaves as they taste like dry grass and old leather. Even the smell of the tea is totally off. To be more specific, I don’t drink sheng from October until late May. I like to call this the «sheng depression season» in Norway.

In my early tea-drinker days, I struggled with puerh cakes drying out during the winter which caused it to lose most of its punch. They just weren't the same anymore after being exposed to the Norwegian winter. I'm guessing the combination of super dry air and cold temperature was too much for the tea to handle, but who knows.

How have I managed to keep my tea safe and thriving during winter time in place like Norway? I have created a «fake» environment for my tea to live in all year long. Some sheng addicts like to call this a «pumidor». I keep it simple and use food-safe plastic boxes from Ikea as storage (fun fact: for some reason these boxes are a perfect match for 357g puerh cakes). The boxes are also more or less airtight and doesn't smell of plastic at all. The reason I wanted something airtight is just to keep uninvited smells away from the tea. I divide the teas in different boxes; I have one box for older teas, another one for the young ones, and a third one for samples and smaller tea cakes. I usually place each cake in an open ziplock bag and I place them standing up like vinyl in the boxes. (See picture)

I also place one or two Boveda packs in each box to give the teas the humidity they need (I personally use Boveda packs with 72% humidity). In the summer, I open the boxes regularly, but more or less never during winter. Before the “sheng depression season” sets in, I usually make sure that the Boveda packs has done their job by measuring the humidity inside the boxes. I usually also close the ziplock bags, but leaving a small opening in order for the teas to “breathe”. I check the boxes a couple of times during winter, but I try not to open the boxes if I don't have to. In early May, I open the ziplock bags fully and wait for the sheng season to begin.

So, this is how I store my teas in order to keep them away from smells and the super dry air during winter. There is also the issue with temperature and light. I have read somewhere that sheng shouldn't be stored too cold and should be stored away from direct sunlight. As you can see in the picture below I keep my boxes in a small closet. The temperature in the closet is measured and I make sure that it doesn't get below 20 degrees (celsius) during the winter.

As a puerh-lover in Norway there is nothing better than opening a pumidor after months of sheng soberness and get hit in the face by the intense smell of the best tea in the world (to me, at least). It's not easy being a sheng drinker in Norway, especially because of all the waiting. But you know what? It's totally worth it.

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IG: @Tea89Noir