*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.

A powerful blend of three sun-dried red teas made by Dá É of Nannuo Mountain, comprised of: spring harvest of 1937-planted dashu gardens, spring harvested Stone Village ancient tree gardens, and winter harvested wild purple bud tea from Bama Wilderness.  All caked up in these 100 gram mini bings that fit into your back pocket.

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.

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, 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.