Jingmai Single Trees

April 2021 harvest Some of the largest tea trees from Da Ping Zhang plateau on Jingmai Mountain blended together Complex fragrance, vibrant mouthfeel and powerful Huigan. Expect 15-20 brews gongfu style. What is single trees tea? Jingmai has the largest ancient tea gardens in the world, however, many of those gardens are mostly populated by relatively recently planted trees. Most tea trees will die within a century, succumbing under the pressure of pest attacks and harsh climate. Due to favorable genetic and environmental factors, some individual make it through the years. We don't know how old these trees are, we can see they are tall and strong to the point you have to climb on the trunk and branches to harvest them. This is how we define 'single tree tea' or ‘Danzhu' as we call them in Jingmai. We could sell the harvest of each tree individually, this would result in 500g-2kg batches, but there are two problems to this. Firstly, such small batches would be very hard to process, we like to have at least 7kg of fresh leaves in the wok in order to get enough steam coming out, by processing individual trees, we would have to be very careful, but it's still possible. Secondly, single tree batches tend to have a singular taste, there would be large variations depending on the tree's genetics and growing conditions. This is why we prefer to harvest a couple dozen kgs of fresh leaves from selected trees and process them together, we get more consistency and more complexity. You could say this tea is an upgraded version of the Jingmai Gulan, but that wouldn't be exact. The flavor profile in this cake is different, some might prefer the fragrance of the Gulan. The sure thing is this tea is more powerful, it delivers more Huigan and Chaqi. We don't recommend you try this tea on an empty stomach or if you're in a hurry. It would be too bad to have to quit after ten brews because you can't handle it. Here is a video we made on a harvesting day: