Chuan Hei (heavy version) – white2tea

Vendor Description

August 2024 tea club. Sichuan heicha (also called dark tea) has a long history. Initially these teas were made from the absolute worst possible materials. Picture piles of twigs, stems and broken up leaves that would rival what you raked up from the forest floor in autumn. These lower grade teas were then pressed into bricks and sent off to places like Tibet to be traded. The reason Tiber wanted teas like these huge bricks of low grade heicha is because the region is inhospitable to most fruit and vegetables, meaning that they also lack for vitamin C. Having bricks of tea to boil (often consumed with yak butter and salt) meant that people in these high altitude areas through Sichuan and Qinghai coud have a reliable source of vitamin C that wouldn’t spoil and was easily transported over long distances. Ok, short history lesson learned, Sichuan heicha has a bit of tradition behind it. However, if you go to modern day Ya’An, the city famous for heicha in Sichuan province (and surprise, we have been there many times, as recently as last month) you will find that nobody makes good heicha. The only heicha being produced is industrial grade garbage. (or if you like that tea just pretend I said something diplomatic) This set me on a bit of a quest to find and produce something that was made from good material in 2023. The first batch was a complete and utter failure, let’s not talk about it; sometimes when you try something new you need a good, solid fall flat on your ass failure. The second batch from this spring of 2024 is what you have in front of you. We made two different levels of fermentation, one lighter and one heavier. It’s a great improvement from the first attempt and a tea that I’d like to age in the future. It’s totally different from these historical heich, in that we used higher quality material and clean processing, but the flavors may remind some of you of raw Liubao from Guangxi or even yellow teas you may have tried. We hope you like this experiment. We don’t have enough to sell, just enough for the club this year, but 2025 may be the year we make a full production if the feedback is good. Suffice it to say, this is another of these “oddball, years in the making” type of things that we do, so you can place another feather in your cap for trying a weird tea. The light version was made with a lighter fermentation phase, the heavier version with a longer phase. The lighter version will be brighter and sharper towards the green tea end of the spectrum, the heavier version should be smoother with more funk.