A spring morning in Qimen, with Zhou Xiang
Each April I leave Hunan’s misty hills for a few days in Qimen, where the mountains hold the original Keemun terroir — red soil, bamboo groves, and small family gardens that have been making black tea for over a century. This 2025 lot comes from a producer I’ve walked with since 2013: a fourth-generation family who plucks only the bud and first leaf in the Mao Feng style, then hand-rolls and gently oxidises the leaves on bamboo trays. Spring 2025 was unusually cool and dry, which slowed the leaves’ growth and concentrated their sugars and aromatics. The result is a Keemun with deeper fruit and a cleaner mineral backbone than we saw in 2024. I tasted through dozens of samples across three days — the final lot stood out for its layered cocoa note and a trace of pine smoke that is never added, but emerges naturally from the wood-fired drying rooms. I selected this 75 g batch for worldtea.shop because it captures everything I love about classic Keemun: wine-like depth, velvet texture, and the quiet hum of a tea that can stand alone or anchor a breakfast blend.