Wow! An excellent year for the Red Guanyin. Mr. Lin, ex-physician and village doctor, made this one batch of Red Guanyin all by hand through a 15 hour oxidation. I am a sucker for the handmade stuff especially when it’s this good. Beautiful almost ruby color, lots of sweets and a bit of citrus, and a spicey top note like candied tangerine. Sold! He had very little left anyway. Each day it was made someone would come buy it all.
The 3 member purchasing committee of Zhong Cha covers 3 different ages, experiences, male vs female palates and 2 out of 3 has to agree on the lot. Definitely a more professional way to go about curating tea for all kinds of consumers, as opposed to a very personalized selection based on my palate alone.
So, it’s time for me to get two staff to step up, fast, maybe 3, so I can retire?
Miss Bai and her brother, mixed race of Dai ethnic, Han, and a couple of other races, own and operate this Pu-Erh factory, an offshoot of the old Menghai Factory. They have their own touch about things: Miss Bai being a woman, runs a very clean facility with a particular perfectionist attitude towards quality in every piece of Bingcha or brick. Mr. Bai, her brother, is philosophical about things. The 1800 year old Pu-erh tree just died a couple of years ago here. Their own village has been care taking the trees for over 800 recorded years. It doesn’t matter, he says, if the Camellia Sinensis arbor type tree is incorrectly named Assamica, even though clearly Assam did not have a tea culture going back a couple thousand years, nor own existant trees in the thousands of years old. It’s all misclassified, but the Pu-erh folks don’t care. There is way too much demand for their tea and what goes into botanical encyclopedia concerns only the academics.
I am not sure I agree. The Chinese have always been a closed world and don’t play with the rest. They have way too many people, things happen in tremendous paces, and resources are too rich for them to worry about the outside world. Even the overseas Chinese tea merchants don’t care. I am the only one who complains about this it seems. Oh, the injustice of calling Camellia Sinensis Pu-erh, into Camellia Sinensis Assamica. Makes no sense to me at all.
Haven’t had Shui Jin Gui 水金龜 (water golden turtle), one of the 4 classic main Wuyi varietals, since almost a decade ago, nor have I tasted the 紫紅袍 Zi Hong Pao (purple red robe), a new varietal, ever. Wuyi Rock teas are literally grown on 3 cm of soil above their rocks underneath, but the rocks are soft and the tea roots dig them apart. Still, this high mineral content soil, old grove arbor style trees, lively water, and unique labor intensive production makes for the most complex, heaviest water, darkest tasting, longest lasting, tribute of a oolong tea ever.
I will have 5 kinds for audience tasting.
The key to preserving Dragonwell- here is the true, thousand year old secret technique： giant pieces of limestone, or smaller pieces in our case ( since we only get to have 2#s of this Handmade Pre-Rain Longjing) are used in the final process to absorb the remaining 1% moisture from the finished leaves. Our tea is ready to be shipped! We will taste some at the Harvest Party on May 2, but otherwise, order it at the store now. We are likely sold out of it by then.
