The Year was 1973

It was the seventies. Tennis was played with wooden rackets. General Motors was America’s most valuable company. The OPEC embargo quadrupled oil prices. And businessmen quick to identify a market opportunity in tea innovated to create ‘ripe’ puer.

With puer tea, storing and aging the tea until it mellows, wasn’t a time-honored tradition. It was only in the latter half of the 20th century when aged puers came to command the attention that Premier Grand Cru reds, for example, hold—in China, at least.

With superior marks on flavor profile, texture, aftertaste, and qi, and limited supply outstripping demand, prices have been on the ascent over the past couple decades.

Before the margins even became fat, enterprising Cantonese businessmen were quick capitalize on this segment of consumers that were interested in drinkability first and foremost but also wanted the textural qualities of the arbor tree puer.

Enter, ripe puer—a terrible translation, as literal ones often are—a term coined to indicate the post fermentation process had occurred as opposed to ‘raw.’ In 1973, enterprising Cantonese tea traders devised a technique to achieve that mellowed out raw puer faster i.e., speed up the aging process of raw puer and thus, speed up the time to market and upfront profits. Instant gratification and the desire for faster profits predates innovation in the tea processing world.

With raw puer, the processing ends at drying out the leaves under the Yunnan sun. Ripe puer, however, must go through the added step of taking these dried leaves and added precise amounts moisture and heat over period that varies from a few days to over a week. The result is a product devoid of the bitterness or astringency that accompanies young teas.

It bears mentioning that technique is of utmost importance. Distributors must rely on the skill of a tea master. Not all who are at the top of their game for making raw puer can make a similarly top notch ripe puer. The risk of “overcooking” and ruining the entire batch is ever present.

Ultimately though, shortcuts simply don’t yield the same product. There isn’t a substitute for time. On the whole, there is much less complexity, but if the underlying tea leaves are of good quality then the texture and sweetness will hold up. It will age beautifully under the right conditions, and in a twist of irony, people will turn around and age ripe puer that can have strong ginseng and date aromas.

Two Additional Interesting Events that Occurred in 1973—A Digression

Roe v. Wade

Supreme Court legalized abortion and had the unforeseen consequence (positive) of causing a precipitous drop in crime in the 1990s. Credit for the decline in violent crime is typically dished out to a combination of stricter gun laws, changes in the crack market, hiring more police, better policing techniques, and so on.

But in fact the guys behind Freakonomics measured crime data in the five states where abortion was made legal before the ruling extended rights to the rest of the country. New York, California, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii. Early-legalizing states saw crime begin to fall earlier than the others.

They identified a correlation between abortion rate and crime rate. States with the highest abortion rates in the 1970s experienced the greatest crime drops in the 1990s while states with low abortion rates experience smaller crime drops.

More correlations that shore up the abortion-crime link in Freakonomics.

Augusto Pinochet became the dictator of Chile.

After staging a bloody (rarely is there any other kind) coup to dethrone Salvador Allende who committed suicide, Pinochet reigned tyrannically over Chile until 1990.        

Gabriel Garcia Marquez vowed never to write as long as Pinochet was in power. But 17 years passed before Pinochet’s reign ended. He broke his vow as he felt he was submitting to “voluntary censorship” by allowing Pinochet to stop him from writing.