When a Hunanese tea master follows the smell of honey to the Wuyi skyline
I first tasted a Jin Jun Mei worth remembering during a late-April morning in Tongmuguan. The mist hadn’t lifted past the bamboo line, and the air was thick with cold dew and the scent of distant charcoal fires. The family who made it — three generations of women plucking the buds — brought a sample to their worn wooden table, and I knew I would carry this tea back.
Zhou Xiang’s approach to black tea is rooted in Hunan’s rich tradition of hong cha, but he’s been drawn to Fujian’s red teas for over a decade. This 2025 lot comes from a single garden at around 1100 meters, where the local Wuyi Caicha cultivar yields tiny, pale-gold buds after the Qingming Festival. The plucking window lasted only five days; every bud was snapped by hand before 8 a.m.
Processing is gentle. The buds withered slowly on bamboo trays under diffused light, then underwent a spontaneous, carefully watched oxidation — just enough to coax out honey and malt without losing freshness. Rolling is done by hand in small batches, and the final drying uses low-temperature charcoal embers rather than an oven, preserving the tea’s silken texture.
The result is a black tea that feels like sunrise on the mountain: soft, deep, and glowing. Zhou Xiang calls it “the showpiece of modern hong cha,” and after cupping it alongside older vintages, I understand why. This is a tea to savour slowly, the kind that turns an ordinary afternoon into a small ceremony.