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quarterly tasting cohort

Storage comparison cohort — quarterly

A quarterly cohort comparing the same raw puerh cake across three storage climates. Led by tea master Liu Shenyang, each session trains sensory calibration — from Kunming dry to Hong Kong traditional storage — building your tasting database at tea.dog.

Duration
13 weeks
Starts
2026-09-01
Seats
16
From
€420 / quarter
Apply

how the quarterly storage cohort works

Storage is the silent architect of puerh character. A single shēng pǔ’ěr (生普洱) cake, pressed in the same year by the same hands, will evolve into fundamentally different teas depending on whether it spent a decade in Kunming’s dry air, Guangzhou’s humid warmth, or a traditional Hong Kong basement. The quarterly storage comparison cohort at tea.dog exists to give collectors, traders, and serious tasters a structured way to build their sensory database for these storage signatures — one side‑by‑side comparison at a time.

Each week for thirteen weeks, participants receive a sample set of three identical cakes, drawn from three distinct storage environments. The cakes are chosen by tea master Liu Shenyang, who selects well‑documented productions from reputable factories — Dayi, Xiaguan, Chen Sheng Hao, and others — with clearly traceable storage histories. The three samples in a given week are the same cake, but their post‑production paths diverge: one lot stored in a cool, dry Kunming warehouse with minimal humidity; another from the naturally humid conditions of a Guangzhou storefront; a third that has undergone traditional Hong Kong wet‑storage, accelerating hòu fājiào (后发酵) and producing deep, mellow notes. This controlled design isolates the storage variable while holding origin, processing, and leaf grade constant.

Sessions are held live online, guided by Liu Shenyang. Each tasting begins with a blind comparison, asking participants to identify the storage climate before any labels are revealed. Over the quarter, members develop a nuanced vocabulary for markers that novices often conflate: the camphor‑like cooling of dry Kunming storage versus the damp wood of Hong Kong; the preserved floral lift of dry storage against the caramelised sweetness of humid cellaring; the way different compression densities inside a tuocha or bǐng interact with moisture over time. Notes are captured in a custom journal designed for storage triangulation, and the community discussion continues between sessions on tea.community, where members share observations and cross‑reference their findings with catalogue data from puerh.app.

At the heart of the programme is the belief that storage identification is a learned skill — not a gift. By tasting the same tea through three lenses every week, your palate builds the pattern recognition that distinguishes an authentic Hong Kong‑stored 7542 from a later imitation. The cohort draws on the full tea.dog search engine to source the rare cakes used in the sessions, and members receive permanent access to the storage theory video module on tea.school. Between formal tastings, the watchlist feature on tea.dog helps you track down similar stored cakes from your favourite climates, and shop.puerh.app offers occasional full‑cake opportunities for the standout samples.

The cap of sixteen seats preserves the intimacy needed for detailed sensory calibration. There is no prerequisite beyond a basic familiarity with raw puerh; the cohort is structured to serve both the seasoned collector who has always struggled to articulate storage differences and the ambitious taster building a professional comparative framework. By the end of thirteen weeks, you will have a calibrated sensory memory for three major storage archetypes, a personal database of over thirty provenances, and a method for blind assessment that you can apply to any aged tea you encounter — all without leaving the tea.dog ecosystem.

Week by week

What’s included