> I believe that the factories have various different methods of
> processing pu'er, and blending cooked and green maocha may be one of
> them. I was told, rather severely, that blending cooked and green
> maocha is merely a myth perpetrated by vendors and consumers who
> judged the brewed leaves on its appearance of cooked and green leaves
> and assumed things - factories such as Menghai Tea Factory was very
> stringent on the Wo Dui process, after the fermentation, leaves were
> graded and picked; leaves that were not fermented fully would be
> discarded, hence the unlikeliness that factories would go all the
> trouble to blend cooked and green maocha to produce a half & half
> pu'er.

These days there are little gradings done as most factories are simply
trying to pump out a large quantity of this tea to appeal to the
newfound hysteria of Pu'er collecting in Guangdong, HK, and Taiwan.
The uneducated locals here all spout the following sentence when
deciding whether to buy a ton of tea or not, "I'm looking for good
quality leaves." (hao cha di..). It's rather annoying because they
don't know what exactly to look for and it is causing the price of
pu'er here to raise to stupid levels. In 10 years, I think tea that
was made after 2005 will be basically worthless because of the huge
demand and huge production from the factories. This is evident also
by the ridiculous pricing of 2004 tea this year; from nearly all
factories/areas of Yunnan.

Most pu'er cakes are blends, but with regards to the bricks, there is
really no telling what leaves go in to make it. I do know that I have
seldom seen bricks with good leaves besides the small menghai
'fangcha' (100g) cakes that I have a few of. Those large bricks
marked 'mi xiang' and 'zao xiang' are relatively worthless because of
the poor quality.

There isn't much of a bright future when it comes to pu'er.