An ideal easy sipping yellow, good on the wallet and whatever brewing method you throw at it.

The most robust grade of yellow tea from the core production region atop legendary Meng Ding Mountain, crafted by intangible cultural heritage inheritor Li Hanmin. Expect a full-bodied, honeysuckle-nectarine laden broth—curiously reminiscent of raw young Liu Bao from one angle, and light-roast southern Fujian oolong from another.  This one features a lighter touch on the yellowing compared to this year's Little Yellow and therefore retains a more fragrant forward nose and complex texture in the jowls.

Purely a craftsman, Master Li doesn't have tea gardens of his own so he secures his harvests with select farmers, including our friends the Guo family, who we have been working with since 2019.  The Guo family primarily manage Fuxuan no. 9 cultivar gardens as well as the rare regional heirloom Lao Chuan Cha, both at higher than average elevations for the area: between 800-1100 meters.  Teas in the Sichuan basin flush early—some bushes at lower elevations are ready for harvest as early as February—and while second flushes elsewhere might appear mid-May, their Fuxuan no. 9 gardens can easily see a second harvest late March. The first flush is naturally devoted to Gan Lu production, but this second harvest proves ideal for leafier grades teas like this Huang Da Cha.  1 bud, 2-3 leaves are plucked, and any woody stems are discarded.

Processing follows the labor-intensive 三炒三闷 "three pan-fries, three coverings" method that defines Meng Ding yellow tea. After initial withering and sorting, the leaves go through multiple rounds of pan-firing and warm, humid wrapping—a wet-heat process that encourages internal transformation and gradual yellowing. The timing and temperature of each round are adjusted based on how the leaves respond, with the full process lasting anywhere from five days to nearly a month. This careful, layered technique deepens the tea’s sweetness, softens its bitterness, and yields a mellow, toasty complexity unique to well-made yellow teas.

Tea material from select gardens, crafted by a recognized master, usually comes at a premium. While the industry’s focus on small-pluck early spring teas from Meng Ding and the broader Sichuan basin may be problematic for many reasons, one silver lining is the relatively undervalued status of later-harvest, leafier teas.

award decorated veteran

Vanishing Breed 

Meng Ding teas aren't currently defined by originating from a single cultivar. A 2023 study by Guo, Wang, and Li studied the 12 main cultivars used to produce Gan Lu and found that Lao Chuan Chá (Old Sichuan tea) and 福选 9 号 Fú xuǎn 9 hào (Fuxuan no.9) to be the most ideal cultivars. Likely due to the sheer diversity found in the plurality of distinct specimens, tea made from Lao Chuan Cha gardens scored exceptionally high in flavor compounds such as polyphenols, EGCG, and water-soluble extracts as well as overall preferred taste and aroma, exhibiting a rare balance in flavor expression despite a high phenol-to-amino acid ratio (usually presenting as bitter or astringent) without any bite. Whereas all other cultivars used to make Gan Lu comprise genetically identical tea gardens due to being asexually planted as cuttings for predictable yield and flavor expression, Lao Chuan Cha refers to seed-propagated tea plants in the diverse heirloom gene pool that has existed in the area for untold ages. In other words, in gardens of other cultivars, the tea is the same from bush to bush, whereas in Lao Chuan Cha gardens each tea bush is unique and contains heritage Sichuan genetics.

The problem with Lao Chuan Cha is that in a market that celebrates tea from the humid Sichuan basin as China’s earliest to market tea (with some iterations being sold by mid-February), this old heirloom flushes over a month later due to these antiquity genetics as well as its typically high elevation, colder environs. Due to genetic differences from bush to bush, harvest times are unpredictable and oftentimes a day’s pickings are not uniform. Yield is generally lower with each plant producing overall less buds than other cultivars, and often only flushing once during the spring. This frustrating lack of flexibility and efficiency in production scheduling, lower overall yield, and missing out of early-season markets has driven many tea producers to uproot their Lao Chuan Cha bushes and replace it with more predictable and profitable cultivars.

Tragically, Lao Chuan Cha is now considered a rare and precious boutique resource as it comprises only 2.5% of the Mengshan tea region.