Heritage Beidou: Our Rarest Wuyi Oolong Tea (Da Hong Pao/Big Red Robe)

Hi everyone, welcome back to Red Blossom Tea channel. Today we'll look at rare teas. Heritage Beidou is one of the rarest that we have at Red Blossom. This is considered the holy grail of Wuyi. Wuyi mountain range is in northern Fujian but the Fujian province produces quite a lot of tea and there are many different varieties of Yancha from this area. The different varieties on our website are Qizong, Golden Buddha, Grand Scarlet Robe, O'Grove Shui Xian. Those are all very nice options to start with and to explore before you taste the Heritage Beidou. Heritage Beidou is rare because it's a particular variety that has a long lineage. I'm adding quite a bit of leaves to my Yixing pot. My Yixing pot is quite small it retains heat very well and what I'm going to use is boiling hot water into this pot. When you add hot water into the pot you can pick up the aroma being released already because this charcoal roasting process of crafting the Heritage Beidou is a long process. We commissioned craftsmen to use longan fruit wood to roast this tea. The leaves were green to begin with but after they have been allowed to oxidize a little bit more then it goes through months of charcoal roasting before we get the finished product. There's a lot of Grand Scarlet Robe and there's a lot of Da Hong Pao basically being sold on the market. Whether it is in China when you visit Wuyi Mountain Range or at an everyday dim sum restaurant in the cities in Hong Kong or even here in San Francisco. But I think there's more Grand Scarlet Robe being sold and taken like this compared to what's being grown. There's a limited supply of Beidou because it is harder to grow this particular variety. It has a lot to do with the provenance and the crafting method. It's similar to having a rare whiskey. It also has to age so that it settles and lose some of its tannins. But I think when you're trying it one way to figure out how good it is is by trying the different varieties first and then eventually making it this traditional Gong Fu Cha style. So after about 30 seconds it is ready to decant. I'm also going to pour out a little into this Yixing cup so you can see the color of this tea. And what I'll do is first test for the nose so you can pick up the aroma already. If you're in the room when brewing the Beidou, the whole entire room has a fragrance that permeates through. Normally at our retail location when someone brews this downstairs at the tasting tables I can smell it in the office upstairs. That is how strong and rich the aroma is. And the difference really is the brightness of the tea along with the complexity in the nose and the finish, the hui gan. Finish meaning you taste it five to ten minutes after. To enjoy a tea like this I often would have something rare like a white chocolate from Guatemala. This comes from Dancing Lion Chocolates. My friend Richard is a famous chocolatier. So when I want to treat myself I would take a piece of chocolate like this and let it melt slowly in my mouth. The white chocolate actually from Guatemala has so much butter fat in it. The cocoa slowly melts in your mouth similar to the finish that I would get in the Heritage Beidou. So if you want to treat yourself to tea like this and you like this video feel free to subscribe to our YouTube channel or of course you could visit our website Red Blossom Tea to view all of our oolongs as well.