Steep pu-erh tea for 3 minutes at 95°C (203°F).
Pu-erh is tea from Yunnan fermented by microbes rather than merely oxidized, and it is the only tea on this list genuinely meant to be aged. Sheng, or raw, pu-erh is pressed into cakes and left to change slowly over years or decades, starting bitter and bright and turning mellow and sweet. Shou, or ripe, pu-erh is fermented deliberately in warm damp piles over a few months to arrive somewhere similar much faster and much cheaper. Both are dark, earthy and thick in the mouth. Both usually arrive as a compressed cake you break pieces from with a blunt pick.
Break a piece off rather than crumbling it to dust — slide the pick in flat along the seam of the cake and lever whole leaves out. Then rinse before you brew: pour 95°C (203°F) water over the leaf, count to five, and pour it straight off down the sink. That first pour is discarded. It washes off storage dust and, more usefully, wakes compressed leaf that would otherwise take two infusions to open. Steep 3 minutes at medium, 2 minutes 15 seconds for lighter, 3 minutes 55 seconds for stronger. Ripe pu-erh in particular is hard to over-brew; the earthiness deepens rather than turning sharp.
Skipping the rinse. Most guides mention it in passing and most people leave it out, and it is the difference between a first cup that tastes dusty and one that does not. The second mistake is brewing the shards. Crumbled pu-erh extracts far faster than whole leaf, so a pot of fragments at 3 minutes comes out muddy and over-strong when the same weight in intact pieces would be fine. The third is judging the whole category on a cheap ripe cake — the bottom of the pile-fermented market tastes like a damp cellar, and it does so for a reason.
Pu-erh is the most generous re-steeper here. Eight or ten infusions from one piece of a good cake is normal, and the tea keeps changing the whole way through: thick and earthy early, sweeter and cleaner in the middle, with a distinctly woody finish near the end. Keep the first few steeps short and stretch them as the color lightens. Aged sheng rewards this most, because what decades of slow storage put into the leaf does not come out in a single pour. Nothing is wasted — the leaf tells you it is finished by simply going pale.
Steep pu-erh for 3 minutes in water at 95°C (203°F), after a quick rinse — pour hot water over the leaf and tip it straight out before the steep proper. 2 minutes 15 seconds to 3 minutes 55 seconds covers light to strong, and the same leaf will give you several more infusions after the first.
Yes. Pour hot water over the leaf, wait about five seconds, and discard it. The rinse washes off storage dust and opens compressed leaf that would otherwise need two infusions to wake up properly.
Raw pu-erh ferments slowly over years or decades in storage, starting bright and bitter and mellowing with age. Ripe pu-erh is fermented deliberately in warm damp piles over a few months, arriving dark and earthy straight away.
No, it is the one tea meant to improve with age. Stored somewhere dark, dry and free of strong smells, a pressed cake keeps for decades and is generally considered better for it.