Greg,

Do not start with "all due respect" because it usually mean you do not
respect the person you are replying to, take it from Donald, he
knows...

We are in China and I have been learning pu erh for more than a year
now from people including:

* Master Leung (creator of the recipe of the guang yun gong bing in the
60's and engineer for the China tea export and import company,
Guangdong)
* Master Chen, who is my teacher, whose familly was the first
generation pu erh seller in guandgong and opened their first business
in 1881 and who was a tea buyer for the CNNP, Guangdong for more than
40 years. He has been dealing and knows all kinds of traditional famous
tea everywhere (tea producing areas) in China.
* Professor Liu - Professor Managing Director for the Research Institue
of tea Science and this person's specialty is "pu erh" and is part of
the writers of the modern Cha Jing.

Because of these people we also have the extreme pleasure to meet a lot
of pu erh collectors and we even have the chance to be able to ask our
questions. So, with all due respect, I think they are right when they
all say that raw puerh is green.

The material use for pu erh is Shai Qing, which is one kind of the
green teas, even after beeing compressed the tea is still green tea. If
you take the "zhang ping shui xian bing" (Michael, you tried that
peculiar compressed oolong), it is a compressed oolong from Fujian,
made with leaves that are from Shui Xian race. Once the leaves are
processed, they are compressed, are they still oonlong tea after? Well,
yes, they are just compressed oolong.


[Greg]
> And the Koo Loo tea is very nice. It has a floral aroma. But again
this >tea is not catagorized as green. In its purest classification,
this is >a fully-fermented red tea;

[Seb]
Let me enlight you about the Koo Loo tea as we have 3 kg of it that we
have made specially for us at the original producing village by a tea
farmer whose familly has been producing this tea for a very long time.
It is one of the rare green teas that you can age and when aged the
liquor do turn red hence maybe you confusion between red and green.

However, I don't know if you have confused it with some other teas, I
am talking about the one from Li Shui village, Gu Lao county,
Guangdong. Take you Cha Jing, page 169 and you will learn about this
tea.

[Greg]
> In most case, you seem very knowledgeable about tea. It took me many
> decades to truely understand the nuances, and I was literally borned
in
> a tea plantation in Fujian.

[Seb]
I like Fujian, I was there last year for autumn harvest at a tea
farmer's plantation in Anxi, and what i found was that Fujian tea
farmers do not really like pu erh tea as they think it is dirty. they
stick to their lovely oolongs...
I have also been to Fuding and Zhenghe, love the white teas too.

SEb