I unwittingly stumbled into the controversy of Puerh.uk when I rather hastily took the proprietor Paolo up on the sale of the famous 2005 ChenYuan Hao Shanzhong Chuanqi in the comments of this post. I simply had a quick look at the site and, despite having some reservations about it, I went all in with a cake.
For those that don’t know I don’t follow any puerh social media, or YouTube, or belong to any chats or discord. I enjoy some puerh blogs, Shah8’s Sheng of the Day, an occasional binge of TeaDB, and sometimes a rare stop in at Tea Forum… I have some email subscriptions from some vendors but mostly if I want to read something puerh related I have to actively search it out. Being bombarded with puerh marketing via social media makes the mind weak (thanks for reading eh?) I am old school indeed and almost as much a puerh hermit online than in real life. So from this insular place of mine I didn’t (and maybe still don’t) understand the full controversy of puerh.uk, a new rebranding of Enlightenment Tea. Even at the time of purchase some of the issues of their limited offerings were quite obvious to me. But how much does all this matter to me? … certainly I care a bit about this or why would I keep rambling on about it?
However, in the end, I’m most interested in the tea. That is why we are reading this post isn’t it??? So with my first order that I placed I told Paolo to send any samples (and he sent many free samples) and I’ll try to post them for all readers to read and be the judge. Specifically, I was interested in the following: 1- like all new vendors I sample from I want to get a feel for their brand through sampling a range of their puerh, 2- I want to compare Puerh.uk’s dry Taiwanese home storage on their ChenYuan Hao cake source to the preferred drier Natural Taiwanese storage of TeasWeLike., 3- I want to try some of their controversial offerings to see what exactly they actually are, 4- I want to ensure that the brand is legit and the cakes sold are not fakes nor are they overpriced, 5- I want to try some samples of things they have not yet offered but might bring in to get an idea of the direction the brand is going. 6- I wanted to have some fun and drink some damn good puerh! Hahaha..
So far puer.uk focus seems to be on drier stored Chen Yuan Hao productions, ZhiXi Hao productions, and Lao Ban Zhang… they seem to be distancing themselves from marketing to those who see puerh as a spiritual quest, they seem to have very quick shipping and good customer service, they seem to be offering some direct competition to Taiwanese based Teas We Like and they seem to be positioning themselves as a vendor who sells higher end puerh.
If you are as curious about controversial Puerh.uk as I am, please join me as I post these reviews and thoughts over the next days and weeks… or don’t and just boycott these posts completely! Haha
Peace
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