Puer Tea Masterclass with Olivier Schneider: Feel the Time

Name: Puer Tea Masterclass with Olivier Schneider: Feel the Time
Start: 2025-09-06T14:00:00+02:00
End: 2025-09-06T19:00:00+02:00
Location: Školská 32, 11000 Prague, Czech Republic

Schedule

Sat Sep 06 2025 at 02:00 pm to 07:00 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

Školská 32, 11000 Prague, Czech Republic | Prague, PR

What makes puerh tea so unique—and so deeply unsettling—is the way it reveals something that speaks to the core of our existence: time.
Puerh ages with us. Its character changes over the years, gradually losing the marks of its youth and, at best, gaining in return the signs of maturation—until it reaches something that resembles wisdom. When we share part of our lives, sometimes decades, with these teas, we can feel them slowly evolve over time, much like the people around us. Like them, teas leave traces in our memory—emotions we wish could last forever, that we try to hold onto or update, but that are always, in the end, outpaced by the perpetual change and flow of time.
This gives these teas the strange impression of being alive—elusive, following their own path, and somehow sharing a moment of our existence.
While this relationship to time is most obvious over long spans—years, even decades—it is no less profound on a much shorter scale: the time we spend with the tea itself, appreciating its taste and aroma. Tasting puerh is a temporal experience. It's not about enjoying a few grams of leaf matter in and of itself—something we are not truly capable of—but about experiencing the time those leaves contain and gradually unfold throughout the session.
To say that tea tasting is a temporal act may sound obvious and not particularly insightful. But not all teas engage with time in the same way. Some are static—teas to be contemplated, that are drunk quickly, seeming to freeze time. These are the teas whose first infusion makes a dazzling impression, only to fade away, leaving us to contemplate their memory like a photograph or a painting in a museum.
Puerh, on the other hand, needs time to express itself—to tell its story. It often takes many infusions for a puerh to build itself up gently, like a long film or a slow novel. A tasting of a great puerh can easily last over an hour, during which the tea constantly evolves, going through various phases and energies, gradually weaving a kind of olfactory narrative. What remains once the tasting is over and will define the memory of a given tea is finally the memory of a time, a dramaturgy.
To truly appreciate such teas is not only to take the time they require, but to be attentive—to notice and enjoy how each one expresses itself through time. It is in this spirit that I invite you to a rare tasting, carefully designed to highlight and celebrate the temporal dimension of a few truly exceptional puerh teas. Inspired by the wine world’s concept of a “vertical tasting”—sampling similar wines from different vintages—we will begin with a tea from the current year and gradually journey backwards in time, ending with one of the finest teas of the 1990s, produced in the same region.
In doing so, we will naturally observe how these teas have slowly built themselves over the decades. But we will also take our time—over four hours or more to listen to the story each tea has to tell, and to discover how each one weaves its own rhythm, its own experience of time.
This masterclass deliberately takes the form of a tasting—light and informal—shared around a table, rather than a structured workshop. The intention is to create time and the space for the direct appreciation of the teas. But beyond simply enjoying the teas and the moment, the goal is also pedagogic and aim to develop a refined and profound perception of a crucial, yet often misunderstood, aspect of this family of teas: their relationship to time.
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Entrance: 2200 CZK / 90 EUR
Masterclass only for 10 guests, please book Your seat via email [email protected]
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OLIVIER SCHNEIDER studied art in Europe and began a career as an artist before falling in love with tea and moving to Asia. He has spent the past 20 years in the Golden Triangle studying tea — especially in Yunnan, where he lived for more than a decade, and in Thailand, where he now resides. Over these years, he has carried out numerous research programs on the teas of this region — in particular the most renowned, puerh — in countries such as Laos, Vietnam, and Myanmar, as well as in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia, which are all deeply connected to the history of puerh tea.
He has written numerous articles about tea and is currently working on a book about puerh that brings together decades of research. He also regularly teaches around the world on tea and tea culture, and works as an independent tea expert and sourcing partner for various tea houses. Olivier now lives in the mountains along the Thailand–Myanmar border, where he owns a centuries-old tea garden. There, he has established a private tea studio to continue his research, experiment with tea processing, and practice the subtle art of tea brewing.
In parallel, Olivier is developing a completely new and artistic approach to tea. His vision is to free the tea leaf from any commercial, conventional, or established form, and to explore its potential as a means for expressing and conveying deeply personal perceptions and emotions.