A couple of thoughts on mold

Today, it won't be about a particular tea. Instead, let me ramble a while on matters of mold in tea.

Lonfgeng episode

A couple of weeks ago, I've been somewhat surprised by mr. Prachar of Longfeng, very self-assuredly, stating that potential buyers of some wetter cake with white coating, he was selling, do not have to worry as it is certainly no mold and that it is normal. I agree that it is nothing outside normality, but how come it is no mold? I checked the white coating under a microscope - and surprise, it was not little fairies dancing with white-light lanterns... it was mold. Well, I wrote to him about that and wrote a (entirely inoffensive post) on Longfeng Facebook - and had been banned from the LF FB in under five minutes. In the message, I was also saying we could at least try to respect each other (we had some disagreements in the past) - I did not get an answer up to now. And the original post was not corrected. Well, that was a disappointment.  

Nevertheless - the point is - why try to cover the fact that a tea is moldy (if it is the white coating; green/yellow mold is bad indeed)? I do not know, nor care whether the Longfeng post about coating not being a mold was a deliberate lie or lack of knowledge. However, why to hide the fact that a tea has mold? In a wet stored tea of around 2000, it is probably not that uncommon. And, as I'll say in a couple of episodes below, almost all puerh has mold in it. And probably no mold in puerh may survive hot water used to brew puerh. A rinsing will certainly help there. One could say that the mold will cause bad taste in tea, but I do not find that really true. E.g. the recently written about 2004 SKM Manzhuan had flecks of mold on stems, that 90s Red Mark (and some others from thechineseteashop) had white bits in it too and there were certainly no taste issues. If a traditionally stored tea which acquires some mold is later let to air out in a drier environment, the white flecks will stay, but musty taste will not.

Tuochatea episode

Reading comments below

http://thegreenteareview.blogspot.cz/2008/11/pu-erh-storage-and-mold-and-return-to.html

I was surprised by Tuochatea's, who's certainly a seasoned puerh drinker, strong-willed comments against moldy tea (again, according to a taiwanese study I'll mention below, probably almost all puerh is moldy to an extent, before being rinsed by hot water). How is any mold poisonous and carcinogenic? What about penicilin, moldy cheese and even puerh? Hong Kong has quite a high average life expectancy with its white-coated tea (though it is questionable how large proportion of people in HK drink that). Or aspergillius crystatum. Or spores of mold which are almost everywhere where it is not completely dry weather and people breathe them.

Art 1 of tea episode

There is an article looking at amounts of bacteria and mold in puerh. All puerhs except one had mold content. And after meeting 80°C water, there was no mold anymore. So much for mold danger in tea...

I took the table, picked up sheng from it and did some quick scatterplots here: 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuguYb-CkGEwdE1qczd0MDNCSWxiMDdtRndQWjV5VUE

Please excuse the crudenes and lack of aesthetics (plus the sample is small, but I can not do anything about it). If you really want, I can make a VIP 3D scatterplot with shining colors.

Seems that there is no  obvious connection between age and mold, while it seems that higher moisture in tea leads to higher amount of mold (not too surprising, I guess).

Nevertheless, the point is - there is mold in puerh. Deal with it.

The rest

I recommend the following article from The Leaf magazine

http://the-leaf.org/issue4/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/puerh-storage-part-222.pdf

- I think that it is a good reading and deals with dry/traditional storage matters, also with mold. I agree that the problem with mold some people may have could have been imparted by dry-storage-promoting vendors who can not store tea "propertly".
When I started with tea, I enjoyed The Leaf as it was one of very few available resources on tea. Later, when I got more hooked up by tea's taste, it was too spiritual to me and most articles did not appeal to me. Now, as time goes on, I feel that many articles in there start to resonate well with me and more often, I understand certain points in there. 

Otherwise, this is a good keyword search, containing some valuable articles on aging and partly mold: http://www.marshaln.com/tag/traditional-stored-puerh/