TEA STORAGE
If you have a bag of tea that you are drinking from, and want to finish within couple weeks or months, there is not much to worry about, except from basic rules such as: keep it dry, air tight, away from strong smell such an soap, incense, spices and so on.
Tea likes to catch all odors like a sponge very quickly.
unfermented tea
I used to believe, many year ago, that the best tea is always the freshest tea from last spring. While this might be truth with most of Chinese and Japanese green tea, with most of other teas is not such.
Many teas, specially the roasted ones need some tome to ‘sit’ after they are made. Oolong often get best just couple months after last roast..
Long term storage of tea can change its character quite dramatically. Taste and energy profile of properly stored teas can become literally medicine.
Aging
First of all, if we want to age tea we need to find a good candidate for aging.
It's generally believed that darker, more oxidised teas aging better than light unoxidised. My personal experience though is that pretty much every tea can be long term stored. Although as for darker Dong Ding oolong we will see change year by year, if we want to store some green tea or very lightly oxidised oolong we could count more into decades. Red teas are particularly interesting when stored longterm and there is now more and more tea producers and collectors storing red teas in Taiwan.
I encourage you to put aside some extra packs of red tea or oolong tea. At leas 50 grams each properly closed. Hide an forget about them.. You might be surprised if you open them in three, four years how much change has happened. They become much smoother, slipping down your throat much easier, bitterness even after brewed with 100C disappeared, and caffeine level dropped significantly to.
Glazed jar
Although storage in plastic bag is very safe and results are pretty good, if you are more serious about your tea, I recommend to use a ceramic glazed jar that need to be properly closed with cork or wax so its airtight. This jars are pretty common in Asia and can often be found in flea markets. The glaze stops the smell and light penetrating; while clay wall keeps the temperature more steady, creating a micro climate which makes your tea much nicer and smoother.
Unglazed jar - YiXing clay
In some cases are also used unglazed jar best are from YiXing clay. Tea stored in this kind of jar will age differently because YiXing clay is penetrable by tiny amount of air and humidity. This is allowing tea to breath and so aging is taking a different direction. With long term storage in YiXing, you need to consider climate you are living in. Because if it’s too dry, it can eventually harm your leaves. It would be much better let them in its original air tight plastic package.
This is very interesting and widely discussed topic.
Among all ageable teas, most famous is Pu-erh.
What makes Pu-erh so special? As you might know Pu-erh tea is undergoing an additional fermentation, which means it is actually never finished tea or 'living tea'. It's storage therefore is also much more sophisticated because what we want to achieve is to create an optimal environment for the microbial activity, which originates in tropical climate of Yunnan.
How to do it?
There was a lot written about this recent years and there are much better experts on this topic than I am but I will try to offer my humble understanding and experience. For those who are new into this.
First of all, Pu-erh needs a right humidity.
The east coast of Taiwan where I live and store my tea, humidity levels are between 60 percent in winter (makes microbial activity very slow) up to 85-90 percent in summer (bacteria having wild party) . This makes Taiwan a pretty good place to storage Pu-erh.
It's not good though sometimes if it gets too humid because it can make a tea leaves absorb too much water and develop mold. Therefore we need to use dehumidifier, special in rainy days. So I try to keep the around 70-80 during the wet months.
On the other hand is environment is too dry.
Such an environment will make bacteria in your tea fist dormant and later it will die completely and your tea will just dry up. Taste will be sharp and unpleasant. And unfortunately it cannot be fixed. Therefore if you live in such a dry place I don't really recommend to do big storage plans and storage oolong or red tea instate. If you are living in tropical climate such as the one in south east Asia you have much more chance to get a good result with your storage. Just never forget to keep you tea away from all the extremes. Not too humid, not to dry, not smell, now windy spot, no stuck air spot, not too cold or too hot spot, no light.
As a storing material you can use unglazed YiXing jar or simple card board box without smell works fine too.
If you are living in very dry place and buying cake or some small portion of Pu-erh I recommend to keep it into a plastic bag and drink within a year.
Many tea stores in Taiwan keep their tea on just around 60 percent all year around. It's safer because it's avoiding too much humidity getting into their tea. It also slows down the ageing process which takes longer time to mature but it also develops much more sophisticated more woody fragrance compare wetter (HongKong) storage where the taste profile goes more into, wet soil - mushroomy side. In Taiwan people generally prefer much dryer storage.
*Dry vs. wet storage its a topic on it's own and I don't want to go to far into this right now..
What is important to know now is that once we get a tea that spent 20, 40, 50 or more years in dry storage we need to ‘awaken’ it. This will bring some oxygen and humidity into the leaves which awaken the bacteria in tea. So we need to brake it apart (if it was compressed into cake, brick or other shape) and expose it to an air and humidity for couple days, up to a week.
If you live in very dry place without chance to awaken your tea naturally, you might use air humidifier or simply try to put your leaves in teapot and give it one quick brew with 100C. Put it aside for hour or two and then start your tea session. It's not gonna awaken all the tea bacteria but it will make you tea taste nicer.