A Tournament of Teas: How I Ranked 2025 Raw Puer in March Madness Style

There’s something brewing in the world of raw puer this March—a chaotic, caffeine-free bracket of comparisons, rankings, and a dash of self-indulgence. Last year’s obsession with puer samples left me with a mountain of tea to unravel, so I devised a tournament-style system to make sense of it all. Think NCAA brackets meets tea tasting, with no actual sports, just steeped curiosity.

The setup? A spreadsheet, a set of identical gaiwans, and a spreadsheet. I bought nearly every new sheng puer sample from my usual vendors, then organized them by region and price range. The goal wasn’t to crown a champion but to distill chaos into manageable matchups. Each round required 12g of tea, a strict limit to force focus. I didn’t grade teas or assign scores—personal taste is too fickle for that. Instead, I grouped them by origin or cost, letting regional profiles or price points spark debate. The “Final Four” and “champion” titles were just for fun, a way to inject some structure into the madness.

Caveats? Brackets were locked in by early November, so any post-December samples (like the Black Friday Snoozefest batch) were excluded. All teas here are 2025 raw puer, with enough stock to survive three rounds of tasting. Some vendors didn’t make the cut because I ordered late or simply didn’t have samples from their 2025 harvest. The process was messy, subjective, and occasionally arbitrary—but it forced me to confront what matters in a cup: aroma, body, and that elusive balance between earthy and floral.

Key points: Tracking samples with a spreadsheet keeps things organized, tournament-style grouping highlights regional or price-based contrasts, and embracing subjectivity turns tasting into a conversation rather than a competition.

What’s your go-to method for sifting through a tea collection? Do you lean into structure, or let the cups speak for themselves?

Questions & Answers

Information sourced from industry reports and news outlets.