Tea: Wild Black (Emei Yehong 峨眉野红)
Type: Medium Oxidized Red Tea
Harvest: May 2024
Region: Emeishan, Sichuan, China
Producer: Emei Tea - Little Yan's Garden
Tasting Notes: Cocoa Nibs, Sweet Potato, Coffee, Blackberry Skins, Bark
This is a beautifully sweet and complex black tea from the sacred mountain Emei Shan in Western Sichuan province. Picked from older trees left unpruned so that their roots can reach into more mineral-rich soils and clays, the tea certainly has that mineral backbone we love to find in out 'wild' teas. While this isn't truly wild, no one is hiking through a sacred mountain with a machete in hand seeking these trees out, they are older groves of the local heirloom tea varietal that have been left alone enough to grow their branches out.
The smell off the dry leaves is incredibly chocolaty, like grinding fresh cocoa beans in a mortar and pestle. When hit with hot water, this fragrance transforms into something more vegetal, like a baked and caramelized sweet potato.
This tea is medium oxidized, meaning that it doesn't brew up very dark, the tea soup is a nice mix of yellow and orange instead of a deep red. We find that these less-oxidized teas have much less astringency, and we always gravitate toward them.
We prefer brewing this tea at lower temperatures, maybe 85 or 90 degrees Celsius, at higher temperatures the complex mineral mouthfeel comes foreword, but at lower temperatures, this tea is like a sweet desert.
