Price range: $16.00 through $30.00
A sweet, mellow, clean, and aromatic broth delivers a red tea (aka black tea in the West) with expert simplicity and brevity. A fruity and delightful daily drinker from the Phoenix Mountains, the home of the wide array of colorful Dancong Oolong varietals in the humid subtropical eastern Guangdong Province.
Again, this is not an oolong, but a red tea.
The particular cultivar is 大乌叶 Da Wu Ye "Big Dark Leaf" is part of the 黄枝香 Huang Zhi Xiang "Yellow Gardenia" / "Orange Blossom" family — which, like all Phoenix Dancong varietals — originally derived from the existent Shui Xian bushes in the greater Phoenix Mountains. The similarities of Da Wu Ye and the ancestral Shui Xian are evident to this day with — as the former's namesake suggests — the large size of its leaves. The name continues to be literal: Da Wu Ye's leaves tend to appear a darker shade of green than other plants. Da Wu Ye is an early-flushing, high-yielding cultivar especially planted in frequency around Feng Huang town, and it's close by, on the way to Wudong Mountain, in Mr. Wen's Fenbei gardens that this particular tea comes from.
In this climate's humid and warmish late winter moments, early flushing Da Wu Ye often will sprout new growth in late February-March. It is this early growth that is used to make red tea.
Wen Jian Fu of Phoenix Town is a respected fifth generation tea producing veteran, and is vice president of the Chaozhou Tea Industry Association.
Certainly aromatic and with a distinct floral note. Drinking this tea with my aged mother, she said the tea’s (medicinal) quality was aiding her sinuses. It increased in sweetness and was certainly a mellow Hong Cha experience. Yes a daily drinker. A good roasting is evident. A nice hydrating mouth feel finishes the session.