Tulipomania and Puerhmania

What about "tulipomania" and puerh 1999-2007 the Puerh Boom, then the bubble pops. Sounded great buy bricks of black gold and make money. It works great until the greed over takes, and there's no time for sound thinking; because you gotta buy before the price goes up more or the puerhs are sold-out. This is not a new story. Just look now at the housing/stock market. But a Masterpiece Puerh will always be a Masterpiece Puerh. And now prices are back down to preboom prices, and the new puerhs are getting better do to production and aging skills. And still wild or semi-wild puerhs are becoming scarce and their prices will continue to increase slowly. Buy Puerh because you like drinking it. I personally have Puerhs in Taiwan, cozy aging. But if you plan on doing your own aging do you homework first. This bubble mostly hurt the ones that bought in 2007, but so, let it ride(age), and drink some. The biggest problem was 2006-2007 there were "not all but"many low quality teas produced and sold as Puerhs, so aging is not going to make gold out of crap. The bright side is if you bought Puerh in 2006, chances are it was harvested in pre-2005 that tea has a great chance of being OK quality harvest. Another good note is if you buy from a experienced source that goes to Yuunan and knows you he is dealing with very well, during those years he still would have been getting good quality puerh, but it would have cost more. Puerh is a very difficult to identify, and to go in a new puerh shop and just ask a few questions and walk out with what you wanted, or going through the internet with a new company or some tea website you just read about, forget it. there are no set standards yet, but we are working at the college in china "Tenfu Tea College", to get a standard language in Chinese and English, as well as a standard for units and degrees of processing standards, many puerh makers have their own ways and it shows up in the packaging and labeling, like batch numbers and numbers to ID the product, year, and recipe, sometimes I even have to drink the tea just to find out if it is a ripe/dark or raw/light/green puerh., because many packages don't put it on or the labels either, and I can read a little Chinese to search for the words , but they are not to be found often. I also work people that can read Chinese well including masters, anyway what I am saying is you gotta do just like the rest of us know your local tea shop works and management, and have puerh tea partys or tasting events at your tea shops, if they have any events, or find some people and get them interested in tea or find some tea, (puerh drinkers). Asian areas in American towns are good for finding puerhs, but that doesn't mean it is good puerh, what is needed is that the shop bosses and/or owners go to Asian or are very familiar with THERE SUPPLIERS! Just one last thing there are some great websites to buy puerh. Sorry no ads here.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/IF26Cb01.html

tulipomania http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania