Summer 2023 Light Roast Ailao Oriental Beauty

In Summer 2024, Mr Huang chose not to produce oriental beauty because there weren't enough insects biting the leaves. This tea is the same as the one we sold last year, but since then, Mr Huang has set up a charcoal roasting room in his factory. The fragrance of this tea has changed after one year of storage, and was awakened through a very light charcoal roasting, which adds a subtle complexity while not damaging the mouthfeel.

Mr Huang is a Taiwanese producer established in Ailao Mountain since 1994. In the middle of Yunnan, he cultivate qingxin oolong gardens and processes high mountain oolong tea in his factory.

After the bulk of the harvest in May, some shoots grow again in a second flush. The gardens are invaded by Jacobiasca Formosana, a tiny jassid that thrives in the gardens and loves to puncture the tea leaves. This mild stress provokes a reaction in the tea trees. The holes in the leaves make the trees vulnerable to viruses. As a reaction, the plants will suicide the cells around the puncture. The polyphenols contained in the cells will oxidize and give a special fragrance to the tea. It is a process comparable to a shaking step, but achieved by the insects in the gardens instead of in the factory.

The processing of this tea is similar to high mountain oolong, although faster since the tea is not rolled into pearls. It is withered to soften the leaves, shaken briefly to complete the work of the jassids, left to rest for a long time to reach a high level of oxidation, cooked in a kill-green machine to stop the oxidation, rolled briefly to extract juice and give a basic shape to the leaves, and finally dried with hot air.

This tea is not available every year, as it requires a large number of jassids to thrive in the fields. Since Mr Huang's plantations are organic and have a good overall biodiversity, he cannot control when the jassids will come.

Non-organic gardens can more easily allow the jassids to thrive by spraying pesticides after the first harvest, clearing the way from natural predators for the jassids to colonize the fields.