u/OneRiverTea

There is now a growing list of green teas in China that look remarkably similar. Anji Baicha, Huangshan Maofeng, Lushan Yunyu, Guzhang Maojian, Shucheng Orchid Bud, Huoshan Huangya, etc. Traditionally, these were all distinct teas made from highly localized cultivar materials and equipment. If you drink Chinese green tea, chances are, regardless of the name on the box, you have had light, tightly straight tea that was made with a machine like this one.

Yesterday, tea producers across Western Anhui turned for a demonstration of this increasingly widespread set of equipment. One producer who came out for this demonstration in Yuexi claims that it was in his native Shexian back in the late 1980's that the first experiments were carried out to combine the straightening and kill-green process in a single device. Today, it can be found almost anywhere straightened green tea is produced. Whereas older generations of producers had to carry out the kill-green process in a wok or heated tumbler, then straighten the tea leaves either by hand or with a cold straightener, that is no longer the case. Wok-frying for needle-shaped green teas like these have been antiquated for decades, while the industry-standard heated tumblers can still occasionally produce an inconsistently cooked product, with some leaves being either charred or left internally green; the older generation of straighter machines required weighted rods to roll the leaves into the desired shape, but they also caused some breakage. I am sorry to admit that this kill-green, straigtener combine device seems to have neither of these problems.

No burnt spots or evidence of straighteninguneven cooking; no damage in the straighening process. These alone are good selling points for interested tea factories and household workshops. Producers are further promised they can use this combine to cut their processing costs in half. The pellets the machine burns make fuel costs cheaper than traditional wood or coal-fired equipment; the combine requires only one person to operate, and best of all: the whole process is done in just 20-30 minutes. All this means a factory can put out more tea in less time, with less labor and cheaper fuel.

While such equipment will cannot become the norm for curlier teas like Xinyang Maojian, Biluochun, or Golden Green, and more premium handmade green tea will always have its place, we are well on our way to a major technical transformation in green tea production.

Starting to actually make some drinkable yellow tea with the massive final-pick Summer tea leaves. Still got a few more days of yellowing and one more round of re-baking to go.

I can now say conclusively why people did like this material historically, but no one here messes with it now. On the original batch, two experienced producers still could not keep a fair amount of the material from burning in the wok. For this batch, 3/6 woks I tried the lower temp (~250 degrees) , which prevented burning, but could also cause some stems and leaves to redden over the drawn-out cooking process. 2/6 woks of tea we again burnt to Hell trying to do the reccomended higher temp they use in Spring green tea (~320 degrees C) 1/6 woks medium temp on for a balanced outcome. This is even after basically a whole day of withering. These stems are partially hardened and the leaves so mature that they are not workable in the same way as Spring material. This is a major demerit/challenge that has to be overcome better in future experiments.

What is to like about this material is the same thing that raw puer sickos like in their pain soup: it's powerful. There is an unmatched great richness of caffeine, sugar, and I don't know else as they leaves get big. It is offers an amazing body feel and sense of energy that I do not really experience with this same material when it is small. The protracted yellowing and roasting process that was done historically also cuts off alot of the unpleasantly astrigent edge.

Every year, we run a 15% sale on all orders in the hottest days of July. This year is no exception. As the sale runs over the next few days, one may consider the following goodies we have been saving for this event:

2023 Bamboo Ridge Puer Tube (Bamboo Ridge Puer Tube)

Tan and other friends in Baotang Village have stuffed a tube cut from local bamboo with aged raw Puer tea. This is a unique and strongly satisfying Qiaomu raw puer tea.

2026 Premium Guapian (Premium Guapian)

With green price wholesale dropping some 20-30% in Lu'an, we are this year able to offer a finer, nearly first-pick Guapian from the Wang Family at the same usual price.

2026 Dancong Cake Repressing

Made with new 2026 material from the Huiwei Community, both the Bee Balm and Duck Butter Dancong Oolong cakes are back and better than ever.

Double Roasted Hubei Oolong (Hubei Oolong)

Also with help from Huiwei, what began as an experimental Maocha may now be called a finished Oolong in its own right.

Big Yellow (Huangdacha) is known for its toasted rice profile, and it was once thought of as a Summer tea. After a whole day of picking and processing this tea, it is clear in how it got that reputation, and why fewer are now making this tea in the summer.

Supposedly, yellow bud tea used to be picked here in Huoshan County's Dahuaping Township from mid-April to early May, followed by pruning. After around 40 days, in the second half of June, the new growth would be picked and processed into what is called Huangdacha. This tea would be made all the way up until mid-August, utilizing larger stems and more mature leaves than would ever be thinkable for Spring-produced yellow tea. The ideal picking ratio is supposedly 1 bud: 3 or even 4 leaves, whatever has not become so mature and hardened that it is unworkable.

Yesterday, we picked from 6am-8am, filling up our wicker baskets before the sun got too hot. At these early hours we did not encounter any mosquitoes, as can be the case in Spring, but a small, somewhat shy little yellow-brown snake, slithering its way through the rows of tea bushes. After the picking, we let the tea wither for 11 hours: we laid it out on the floor with fans indoors for the first 7 hours, then without fans for the remaining 4 hours on porous drying racks. Two more experienced producers, Chen Lifeng and Liu Yang, thought that even by 9 pm, the tea had not yet withered enough, despite a floral aroma from the fresh leaves that suggested it was time to cook. Indeed, when the tea leaves and stems at last hit the wok, they were still too damp. The high temperature of the first wok (300°C+), combined with such damp leaves, meant that a good deal of the tea blistered and burned immediately. Despite all the following shaping work done in a second, low-temperature wok, careful sifting out of burnt debris, and all the fermenting that is yet to come, this initial moment of scorched contact has more or less determined that this tea will, in shape and flavor, be distinctly burnt. This may be a pleasantly sweet and strong tea in the end, but it will carry blisters of this encounter into the cups where it is finally enjoyed. That is a major demerit in a country where the visual shape of tea is so prized.

I am left wondering if a slower but more extended cooking than what is conventionally suggested, as recommended by one Guapian producer, can prevent such burns. Neither Chen or Liu currently make Huangdacha or any other tea with material this late into the Season, with both instead opting for late Spring material. However, one neighbor has said that it was material from precisely this time of year that older generations in this village (Jinjishan) would use to make the best tasting tea. Whatever it was that once made these Summer picks so good, it does not seem to be worth dealing with the unrelenting Summer sun and such finicky raw leaf material.

Everything about Wuyishan can easily make one cynical and apprehensive. It is a beautiful, well-visited tourist city that is home to an equally massive tea industry. Although the cost of raw tea has dropped here, you can still run into retail-priced top grade tea for north of 10,000 Yuan per Jin. And according to two local producers, there are still people buying, and not just as a means of tax fraud or financial speculation.

Given restictions on tea planting within the core area, there is also a much larger number of consumers buying cheaper tea produced in nearby counties. Demand is well beyond the supply of many famous growing areas. Some of this outside tea is still delicious and organic, but rarely labeled properly. This gives an enthusiastic seller seated at inviting tea table one more advantage over less discerning tourists.

Here one can meet blinged out proprietors wearing tasteful jade and rough, monastic-inspired fabric. One we met was a Hebei-native who ran a tea house in Beijing, another a Shangdong-native who ran a Puer business in Shanghai. Both now live in the area full time. Both women frequent the temple associated with the origin of Dahongpao and both of them make a good deal from the business off of private, themed tea retreats. Now both devout Buddhists, they reflect an interesting overlap between faith and the local industry. The temple in question, Tianxin Yongle, is the site of tea production and tea tourism activities; while the merchant transpants have now, at least aesthetically, also taken on the imagery and lifestyle of the temple where their great moneymaker was born.

In contrast, a small roastery located within a roadside scrap-yard shows the quiet skill that has made the local Oolong tea famous. Here, three visiting local factory owners were anxious to make a good impression on a master roaster. For most of the year, tea is being roasted and re-roasted over charcoal at his littlr workshop. Tasting bowls, timers, and thermometers always close at hand. The master and his two apprentices (one night shift, one day shift) are never absent. The toasty and highly fragrant character that newer factories must deliver with their tea can depend on specialists like this. His irreplacable expertise, and constant presense in the shop when tea is roasting, keeps the whole system of Wuyishan together.

There seems to be a lot more crazy stuff to experience in Wuyishan - this is just a passing encounter and some thoughts at the airport on the way out.

For at least the last 300 years, countless, perhaps millions of tea bricks have been brought up from Shaanxi, Hunan, and Hubei to cities like Hohhot, Baotou, and Ulanbaq. From these urban centers, the tea then made its way to every scattered yurt and bannerman under the Great Blue Sky. There, the tea bricks would be boiled with toasted millet and various dairy products to make the Mongolian tea soup we have posted about here before. Another brewing style would develop in the urban hubs of the brick tea trade.

Hohhot, the Capital of Inner Mongolia, in particular produced a culture of jasmine-dark tea consumption unique in the country. This was no accident. Much of Hohhot is covered in some of the most alkaline and salty soils in the country(白霜咸土). The water brought up from under this soil or pumped up from the Yellow River is of a mineral hardness that makes tea naturally flat, and flavorless. Luckily, the modern urban population had a solution for this problem: jasmine flowers. Unlike the ethnically Mongolian steppe population that today lives further north, where better soils, lakes (and grasses) can be found, it would be Shanxi-born merchants and later industrial workers that would build up Hohot into the city it is today. Jasmine green tea was by the early 20th Century already the established favorite of Shanxi workers and bosses alike. They, too, came from a place with notoriously hard water.

Although the culture and dialect of the city today are largely the legacy of these later Shanxi immigrants, brick tea has been an enduring staple. Restaurants had long offered a hardy breakfast of Shaomai and Brick Tea. This Shaomai is not the thin steamed pastry stuffed with glutinous rice or vermicelli as it is in most of China, but a hardy bun stuffed fully with lamb or beef. The brick tea comes infused, not boiled, in the same large ceramic tea pot still loved everywhere on this side of the Yellow River. The deluxe experience would be a combination of jasmine green tea and dark tea, left to slowly infuse to produce the maximally strong aroma and flavor. The local expression went "小叶板砖，喝得心宽" - "Small leaves and a chunk of brick, a drink to soothe the heart."

I use the past tense here, as bottled water may bring this local tradition to an end. We could find just one tea shop in the whole of Hohhot that specialized in brick tea. As the proprietor of that shop explained, a new wave of Southern tea vendors has taken over the market centers from the older Shanxi and Gansu merchant families. While jasmine tea is still very much on the menu, now more delicate white teas and green tea can be enjoyed with bottled water. At the Tea Museum set up at the Dashengkui memorial to dark tea merchants, one can find only a single lonely tea brick. The "museum" serves now mostly as a Puer retail shop.

For now, however, you can still try this unique brewing style at eateries that specialize in Shaomai and other local snacks.