*Red tea is the direct translated Chinese name (红茶 hong cha) for what the English took to calling black tea, the name most western folks are familiar with.

Made with tea leaves usually destined for raw pu’er, this returning fan fav is the fully oxidized version of Dá É’s ancient tree raw pu’er. Rosy, wintergreen vapors lift off of the rinsed leaves followed by a brisk, full-bodied session of dark stone fruit and tobacco with a good balance between astringency and resalivation.  A pleasurable 100 gram cake to drink through, yielding longer sessions than most teas.

When primary makers of a one style of tea decide to turn their tea leaves into a red style, typically an amount of similarity to the primary style tends to still be perceptible somewhere in the flavor.  In the case of this tea, one can pick up on Nannuo terroir ancient tree sheng notes without too much difficulty. Those with sheng-sensitive stomachs can rejoice in this Yunnan ancient tree experience without worry.

Production is rather straightforward, there's harvesting, withering, rolling (machine for about 40 minutes), piling (clothed basket for 6 hours), and then sun-drying. Dá É has been making red tea all her life, and it remains one of her best selling styles.  Before the Pu'er boom in the early 2000s, we may recall that Yunnan's most famous tea on the market was Dian Hong.

Sun-dried reds may be subject to a short aging trajectory of further mellowing and sweetening. There is speculation that in such a low-tech Yunnan red that there's always some left-over enzymes that didn't oxidize, and then weren't further denatured by the standard high-heat oven-bake finish that many other notable red tea styles are treated to.  The idea is that the sun-drying treatment keeps the leftover enzymes alive, and therefore these Yunnan reds are living-enzyme teas that will continue to transform with age, albeit not as dramatically as sheng pu'er or white tea.