a living archive of storage conditions

The Cross-storage reference programme began not as a spectacle, but as a question — what does time do to tea when the air and the walls are different? In 2016, a single production run of Sheng Pǔ’ěr (生普洱) maocha from the Bān Zhāng (班章) region was pressed into eight identical cakes. One cake travelled to each of the six member-accessible cellars scattered across climates from the humid lowlands of Guangdong to the cold, dry winters of Buryatia. The remaining two were sealed as archival controls. Every spring, after the first flush, the cakes are opened and tasted. No other programme has run this long with such rigour.

When you step into one of the cellars, the air feels deliberate — cool, slightly earthy, filtered through thick stone walls. Light arrives through a single high paper window, tracing a slow parallelogram on the bamboo shelves. Tea master Liu Shenyang is often present during the annual tastings, moving between the cakes with the ease of someone who has watched them change year after year. He lifts the wrapper from the Bān Zhāng cake, and the crinkle of the paper carries the scent of the cellar it came from — camphor and stone fruit in one, deeper, almost resinous in another.

Each cake wears its provenance visibly. The wrapper — hand-brushed with the characters Bān Zhāng — darkens differently; in one cellar it remains pale, in another it has taken on the amber tint of aged paper. The weight of the cake in hand is a study in density: a drier climate yields a slightly lighter, airier disc, while humidity brings a compressed heaviness.

Liu Shenyang is not a demonstrative master. He does not lecture. He prefers to circle the table, setting out small tasting cups and weighing the leaves on a scale that has accompanied him for two decades. When he brews the anniversary cake, the rhythm is unhurried — rinse, paused pour, the lift of the gaiwan lid that releases a fleeting cloud of steam. The first sip at the annual tasting always carries a moment of stillness, as if the whole room is holding its breath.

The data from each tasting flows quietly into the digital heart of our network. On puerh.app, members can explore chromatographs, tasting notes, and environmental logs. Discussions spill into tea.community, where collectors debate the subtle interplay of humidity and microflora. The programme is not about declaring one cellar better than another — it is about understanding the personality that each storage environment imparts. A cake from the Yunnan cellar might show a brighter, greener top note, while its Guangdong sibling leans into dark plum and leather.

Membership is minimal but layered. You become a co-guardian of the reference set. Your annual contribution funds the precise environmental monitoring in all six cellars — temperature, humidity, barometric pressure — recorded hourly. You receive a small sample of the annual tasting cake, enough to hold in your gaiwan and wonder about the distance between a mountain village and a cellar in Buryatia. The team also sends quarterly cellar performance reports, written by Liu Shenyang in his measured, observational style.

The programme stands as a quiet rebuttal to the noise of speculation. It returns the conversation to place, time, and care. In a world that often chases the newest or the oldest, this reference set simply asks: what is happening here, now, and why? Tea, after all, is a living material. The record we keep is a slow, annual portrait of its life.

the annual tasting ritual

Each spring, the eight cakes are gathered and tasted over a single, carefully orchestrated session. The procedure is identical across all cellars — a control for curiosity. Liu Shenyang breaks a corner of the cake with a flat pu-erh knife, the dry leaf releasing a faint scent of hay and old books. Water, just off the boil, fills the gaiwan, and the leaves slowly untangle into a dark amber liquor. The first steeping is discarded, the second poured evenly into white porcelain cups lined along the table.

Participants — never more than a handful — are invited to sense, not to judge. Aroma, body, finish, and the aftertaste that lingers five minutes after the cup is set down are noted in handwriting that will later be transcribed into the programme archive. Liu Shenyang rarely speaks during this part. He watches, listens, and occasionally taps a finger on a note someone has written, his expression unreadable.

The tasting notes become the year’s report, published on puerh.app and used as teaching material on tea.school, where members can enrol in short courses on comparative storage. Meanwhile, the sample sets sent to every participant include a few grams from each cellar, pressed into small, numbered envelopes — a private, sensory scorecard for quiet study at home.

Members who wish to deepen their own experiments can acquire sister cakes from the same Bān Zhāng batch through shop.thetea.app. This closes the loop between watching and doing — between trusting an archive and building one’s own.

Amenities

• access to the complete comparative archive on puerh.app

• annual tasting session hosted by Liu Shenyang

• quarterly cellar performance reports

• private storage consultation with Liu Shenyang

• invitation to cellar visit days

• sample of the annual reference cake

• member pricing on sister cakes at shop.thetea.app

• priority notification of new tea.money campaigns

What’s included

• annual membership to the Cross-storage reference programme

• complimentary sample set of the year’s tasting

• digital access to archival tasting notes and environmental data

• participation in the annual online tasting call

• two guest passes to cellar visits

• option to invest in the sister cake release

• personalized tea storage recommendation from Liu Shenyang