Falling in Love with Keemun Black Tea

Hey teaheads! This is Don from Mei Leaf. In this video, falling in love with a classic black tea. In this video we are going to be turning our attention to Qi Men Hong Cha, or Qi Men black tea. This video is going to go under the tea trips and the tea master classes playlist. If at any point in time you enjoy this video then make sure you hit it with the thumbs-up. The more thumbs in the air the more tea videos are going to come your way. If you haven't subscribed to our YouTube channel yet then go click that button. We are in Qi Men, An Hui, in China. Every province in China has its own unique character, but for me, one of the most scenic and picturesque provinces is An Hui, with its crystal-clear streams, its verdant, lush mountains covered in pine and bamboo, super-friendly people, very, very fresh, crisp air, and villagers which look like they have been lost in time. Just like those villagers, in my opinion, Qi Men black tea is a little bit stuck in its history. Whilst the resurgence in true tea has quite rightly focused on the purity of greens and whites, the cornucopia of flavors of Oolongs, and the character and eccentricities of Puerh, in my opinion, not enough attention has been placed on black tea. Which is why we decided to come here to Qi Men to turn the spotlight onto Qi Men black tea. Welcome to An Hui. I said that Qi Men black tea was a classic black tea. In fact, its history dates back to 1875, when it was officially recognized, and this area was protected by the emperors of China. The variety that's used for Qi Men black tea is the Zu Ye Zhong variety, which is a really interesting variety, supposedly very rich in an aldehyde called myrcinal, which is a derivative of the terpene myrcine, which is found in a lot of other plants. Myrcine has a very calming effect, and has a particular kind of earthy, fruity aroma. When you smell these leaves here, which I'm going to get my nose into these, they definitely have a distinctive difference to the smell of fresh leaves that I've smelt in my travels. A lot fruitier, a lot ripe fruits, is what I would say. Green apples and ripe fruits, but with a kind of pungent earthiness to it in the fresh leaves. So I can definitely smell that this variety has a different character to it. The picking on it is very fine picking of a bud and one leaf, or a bud and two leaves. They only pick once per year here. So they'll pick in springtime, and then they'll prune the plants back to allow them to recoup and build up flavor for the next year. So they will not pick summer or autumn tea here. They don't do that. They started picking pre-Qing Ming 25th of March, and usually they'll pick until the middle to the end of May. All of the tea fields from this farmer are in really good condition. The plants look super healthy. They're on really steep slopes. These plants are grown from seed, not from cutting, and are approximately 50 years old, although the farmer says he has some fields which are older, 100 to 150 years old. Really, really lovely to see. They don't use pesticides here. They use the sticky paper to capture any little bugs and insects. Really, really high-quality stuff. I can't wait to taste their tea. It's a beautiful, starry night. It's about ten past nine in the evening. These guys are going to be working through the night. It's a busy, busy season here for Qi Men. Let me give you the classic walk-through to show you the Qi Men black tea processing. Follow me. The smell in here is incredible. So what we have here is the fresh leaves. The fresh leaves are split up into the type of picking. So here you have Da, big picking. It still looks very fine to me, but the leaves are a little bit bigger. Over there is Zhong, which is middle picking, and over here is Xiao, Xiao picking. Really, really fine. The picking is a bud and one leaf, or a bud and two leaves. Super-fine picking, really plump leaves. They will leave them piled up here for about three hours to start to wither. Then they do heated withering. Let's go through here. Behind that wall is a wood fire, a big wood fire, and it's blowing air through these troughs. You can see here that this is bamboo sieves, and then a metal sieve on top. They will pile the leaves up. Take a look through here. Let's try not to disturb them. They'll pile the leaves up here, and these are withering over heat. The smell of these leaves is incredible. It's nothing like I've smelled before with withering leaves. It's very fresh, very vibrant. It reminds me of Granny Smith apples, those very bright green, crunchy, fresh, slightly sour apples. Gorgeous. They will leave it in these troughs for about six hours, depending on the leaves, depending on the weather, and every half-hour or so they will take the leaves from the bottom and put them to the top. So they'll rotate the leaves so that there's an even withering. After this phase they will roll the leaves. Let's go over here. So they'll be using these machines here, classic rolling machines. You've seen them for most types of tea, but the key here with black tea is that they do this rolling phase before any heating. So they'll extract all of the juices to their surface without breaking the leaves, using these contoured edges. Those juices will start to react with the air, and it will start to oxidize the leaves. After this phase they will de-clump the rolled leaves and put them into baskets, and then they will bring these baskets to this heated room over here. This heated room is the oxidation room, and this is running at about 20... There's nothing going on at the moment here. This is running at about 25 or so degrees Celsius, so a stable temperature. They'll keep them in baskets, and they will oxidize the tea. It will take between 8 to 10 hours. After the oxidation phase they bring the baskets out, and they want to cool and slightly dry the leaves. So here is some finished, oxidized tea. You'll see that they take the leaves and they dig a hole through the middle of the pile of the leaves, and that means that it will start to cool evenly. The smell of these leaves... Oh! They're very different to the fresh, withering leaves. That fruitiness has gone, and it's been replaced with like a medicinal honey camphor, menthol, honey sweetness, some flowers, some dried fruits. Wow! Delicious, delicious. Then they'll put it into those machines over there that will start to just de-clump the leaves, make sure that all of the leaves are nice and even. So this then is spread out over these mats to cool and dry slightly. It's still pliable, probably about 70 percent dry. It's still pliable. At that point there's a very key decision to be made. If it's high-quality tea, which is the Xiao leaves, the very fine-picking, small leaves, they will hand-roll the leaves. I'll show you that in a second, but first of all let's show you what happens with the Zhong and the Da. So they're still high-quality, but considered to be lower slightly. They'll bring them to this machine here. So these are now cool, and these rotating blades will just even out the leaves into a single layer, and it passes through this conveyor belt running it between about 120 to 140 degrees Celsius, and it will dry the leaves. This is considered Qi Men Mao Feng, which is still high-quality, high-grade Qi Men, but is not quite the level of the hand-rolled stuff. This is the finished article here. It's still steaming. These are now dry. You can feel they're losing their last bits of moisture. Oh, the smell here is incredible. The sweetness has come out of it, those honeyed notes. Honey, flower, wild flowers, malt. Incredible, incredible smell, making my mouth water. Gorgeous. So this here is finished Qi Men Mao Feng. Once this has stopped steaming and is fully dry this is now ready for market. But for the truly high-grade stuff, that Xiao Picking, there's the hand-rolling phase. So instead of going through this conveyor belt system, the freshly oxidized and cooled leaves goes to hand-rolling over charcoal pans. Follow me. This is the real skill of Qi Men processing right here. So you have these skilled workers, here, hand-rolling the leaves. You can see the level of work that goes into them. They're taking those pliable leaves and they're hand-rolling them. They're making little balls in their hand and rolling it over charcoal-heated pans. Now what this does is it's basically, essentially, an extra rolling phase. That's bringing even more of the juices to the surface, and therefore you're going to get a much richer, stronger, and more complex flavor as soon as it is brewed in water. They're laughing at me, because I picked on one. All right. Okay. So we're going to pick on all of them. Go on, pick to him now. Yeah? After this phase they will then dry the leaves, and that can be done over charcoal, although that's not as commonly done, and is usually by special order only, because it's very hard to keep an even temperature on charcoal heating. As I said, they do it here. It can be done, but for the most part they'll go for the more consistent heating, which is using electric heaters. Electric heaters, the classic bamboo and metal trays, which will rotate, running at about 100 to 120 degrees Celsius, and this will take in the region of about 40 minutes to an hour to finish drying. The finished article is in these sacks here. Let me show you, and I hope you can see the difference. This is hand-rolled Qi Men Xiao. You can see very, very fine, lots and lots of copper buds here. Different look to the Qi Men Mao Feng, which is still a super high-quality tea, but this is just that extra level up. So this is hand-rolled, small, fine-picking Qi Men black tea. My favorite part of any tea trip is the tasting, and here we have the Mao Feng. So this is Qi Men Hong Cha Mao Feng. So this is machine-dried and unrolled, and this here is the Qi Men which has been rolled. So you can see visually, hopefully in one frame, you can see visually the difference. One is much finer-rolled, and you can also see that the leaves are smaller. So you can see that the hand-rolled stuff is done for the Xiao leaves, the finer-picking. The smell of the dry leaves is this beautiful mix of malt and fruit, kind of jammy, almost wine-like. This is what I always get with Qi Men black tea. Slight kind of alcoholic-fermented note, fruity, but then that malty honey note to it. So this is, first of all, fresh Mao Feng we're tasting. It has a very freshly made taste to it. A little bit green, not as smooth as Qi Men that has been left for a little while. I always recommend with Qi Men, as with most black teas, it needs at least three or four months. So the fresh is going to have a bit more heat, a bit more astringency, than the slightly older tea, which is going to be smoother, and definitely more gentle. So the smell of the hand-rolled, oh, it is remarkably different. Richer, darker, more biscuity, dark-dried fruits. Whoa! Malt and chocolate. Wow! That's quite incredibly different. Ooh! Okay, let's taste the hand-rolled Qi Men. Really different. It doesn't have that greenness. Mmm! Sweet, bakery. It's like dark fruit jam, Danish pastries, but dark, baked. Really sweet, really smooth. This is fresh out of the oven, so it's just come out of the dryer, and it's really, really smooth. You can taste the charcoal. You can taste the fact that it's been hand-rolled over charcoal. It's got that biscuity note to it. The leaves I was looking at before, they do look different. Not just in terms of the fineness, not just in terms of the amount of roll, but these ones here, the hand-rolls, just look glossier. They look oilier. It looks like they've been pressed a little bit, and the oils have been brought to the surface. Remarkable difference. So the same tea, albeit slightly different pickings. So the pickings are going to have an effect here, but other than that the processing is the same, except for the drying phase, whether or not it goes through the conveyor belt drying, or whether it goes through hand-rolling before drying. Remarkable difference. Remarkable. Hey everyone. Sorry for the intermission, but I wanted to quickly say that, as you've just seen, I was so impressed by the differences in the taste between the hand-rolled Qi Men and the Mao Feng Qi Men, that when we selected our Superior Qi Men for 2018, which of course is hand-rolled, we also purchased up some of the Mao Feng from the same plants made by the same producer. Now we're not going to be stocking the Mao Feng under Mei Leaf, but for every pack of Superior Qi Men that we sell we're going to be giving away a free sampler of the Mao Feng, so that you can taste the difference that hand-rolling makes yourselves. And, two weeks after the release of this video, we're going to be doing another video where we're going to be doing that taste test ourselves. So if you want to drink along with us then don't watch that video until you get your goodies. Right. Intermission over. Back to China, where I'm about to get my mind a little bit blown. Just to over-complicate things, you can also hand-roll, but with a different style. So this one here is hand-rolled, but instead of rolling in a ball shape, instead of rolling like this, they roll like this. When I ask them, what's the difference in terms of flavor, in the producer's opinion this stuff is going to be smoother than the rotating, or circular, rolling tea, whereas this stuff is apparently slightly stronger. So we're going to give them a taste as well to see if the roll makes a difference, as always. Every little stage has its own level of complexity. Okay, so let's try this straight-rolled. Again, totally different. Really light, really smooth, really flowery, intense floral note. Flowers, slight honey, but nothing like the depth and richness of this one. This one's all about smooth, light, flowery, gorgeous, gorgeous tea. Wow! The difference the roll makes is quite spectacular. I would never have thought that just rolling this way, or rolling this way, would make such an incredible difference. It's like two different teas. It's incredible, this area. So clean, the air, the briskness in the air, and this water is crystal clear. Crystal clear, really fresh. You can drink it. It's so clean, it's so sweet, full of little fish. Truly, An Hui province, in this area of Qi Men, is idyllic. It's incredible. Just untouched. It's beautiful. Supremely clean. A far cry from a lot of the imagery that you see about China. So we're here in the village, in Qi Men, with the chief of the village here. He kindly invited us to his house, where we're tasting some Qi Men. This one is a Mao Feng, but it's a very special tea because it comes from an area where there are lots of rocks, and very particular types of rocks. So the plants are growing in amongst these rocks. In a way, this is a kind of Qi Men Yan Cha, because it's picking up so much of the minerality from these rocks. We're going to go and take a look at them later. The smell, again, with Qi Men, it's that earthy, but fruity, ripe fruit smell that I'm getting. There's some warmth. There's a bit of biscuitiness to it as well. But it's that real predominance of fruits, red fruits, dried apples, and an earthy note to it. Let's taste this rock Qi Men Hong Cha. The minerality is definitely there. I can feel it on the sides of my tongue, a tingle, an acidity. Definitely, definitely more fruity. Just fruity, really tangy, fruity. But as I said, not in a young, vegetal kind of sappy way, but in a really fruity way. So I forgot to mention earlier that the level of oxidation makes a big difference. If you oxidize it slightly less, for slightly less time, then you're going to maintain more of those fruity notes from the fresh leaves. If you oxidize it really, really hard, then you're going to lose some of those, but bring out more of the honeyed notes, more of the sweeter notes. So there's a choice that needs to be made in the processing. Really, really lovely balance on this tea. It's got the warmth. It's got the malt. But that fruit is there, and it's not something that's astringent and too young. It tastes very ripe. The fruit tastes ripe in it. Right. I'm here with the chief of the village. We are on the most beautiful hiking trail, just for a moment. Forget about tea. Just walking in this area is stunning. It's like walking into a postcard. Incredible. Free-flowing streams, rocks, trees. It's just gorgeous, and the temperature is perfect. But what we're standing on here, and Celine, if you pan around you'll see here this purple rock. This is the rock that we're talking about. This is the rock that is particularly prized. If you tilt up you can see there are some relatively wild, in fact quite wild, tea trees up there. The tea that we tried earlier comes from these kinds of plantations, where you have relatively untended tea trees growing on these really interesting purple rocks that apparently, millions of years ago, were under the sea, which gives it a particular minerality. It gives the rock a particular minerality, which gives that Yan Yun rock-rhyme taste to the Qi Men Hong Cha. We're at the market here. It's very noisy, very busy, just like markets should be. This is a market for fresh leaves. So the small landholders, the small farmers that have tiny little plots, they pick their leaves, they bring them here, and the producers, the people that will finish the leaves, turn them into finished tea, are purchasing. So it's a lot of haggling going on here. People are showing their leaves. There's a lot of, no, no, no, don't like it. Quality is really about the picking. That's first and foremost. How small the leaves are, how fine the picking is, that's what they're looking for. Obviously, there are probably a myriad of other quality markers that I don't know about, that these guys have years of experience purchasing. But this is what the small landholders do. This is not what we do when we purchase our tea. We tend to buy tea directly from producers, which have their own farms, or maybe they deal with certain farmers each and every year that they know the quality. But this is how a lot of tea is made in China. We've left the bustling and noisy market behind us. It's full of atmosphere. It's great to see that the fresh leaves coming from these gorgeous mountains are finding buyers behind us, and that business is thriving. We did try to do a deal for that rock Qi Men tea, but the asking price was too high, in my opinion. We're always looking for unique teas. It was a gorgeous tea, but the experience in the cup did not justify the price. However, we have other farmers here. We're going to keep searching, and we've scheduled in another full day in order to find our Mei Leaf black Qi Men tea for this year. I hope that this video has given you a taste and experience of the gorgeous An Hui province, and piqued your interest, if you are not a lover already, of black Qi Men tea. That's it teaheads. If you made it to the end of this video then make sure you hit it with the thumbs-up. Check out our YouTube playlists and let us know if there are any videos that you would like us to make. If you're ever in London then come visit us in Camden to say hi and taste our wares. If you have any questions or comments then please fire them over. Other than that, I'm Don, Celine is behind the camera, from Mei Leaf. Thank you for being a part of the revelation of true tea. Stay away from those tea bags, keep drinking the good stuff, and spread the word, because nobody deserves bad tea. Bye.