Twisted black leaves flecked with golden tips make this cup: malty and buttery, with chocolate running underneath a hearty, full-bodied brew from first sip to last. The liquor pours coppery and dark, thick in the mouth, carrying malt, butter, chocolate and honey alongside a faint edge of date and lemon that lingers after the swallow.
The leaf comes from Anhui province in eastern China, though the Mao Jian style is thought to trace back to neighbouring Henan, and versions of it now turn up in tea-growing regions right across the country — Mao Jian is more a family of teas than a single fixed recipe. Anhui itself is a substantial place to be growing tea: 54,431 square miles, a population of around 60 million, and thousands of people working in its tea industry. Production there goes back to the Qin and Han dynasties, roughly 2,000 years ago, and the province is also home to Huang Shan Mao Feng and Keemun Black Tea, two of China's better-known names, which puts this Mao Jian in good company. Tea & Coffee packs this one fresh to order rather than from a held stock.
China is generally reckoned to be tea's original home. Green tea is said to go back some 5,000 years there, black tea only a few hundred, with Lapsang Souchong usually credited as the first of the black teas, and China still grows more tea than any other country today, a position built on regions like Anhui.
Brew with freshly boiled water and give it three to five minutes to steep. It takes milk, sugar, honey or lemon without losing its character, so there is room to adjust it to taste, or drink it black if you would rather have the malt and chocolate notes on their own, undiluted.
