Tea at Cher’s is always interesting because she’s a woman of great tea resources and has all the interesting teas. So after our tea blending experiment, we continued to just drink from her collection of tea. One of the teas that she brought out was this gorgeous Yunnan Purple Bud (云南古树紫芽苞). Look at how gorgeous the buds are:

I am loving how the buds are tinged with purple. According to Cher, these are wild grown from old trees in Yunnan. I’ve always associated Yunnan with Puer, so it was interesting to see that they’ve got this white tea [1] from purple tea trees, which are also pretty rare. According to the Baidu article, which is now the first thing I look at when I’m googling about Chinese teas, the representative purple teas are:

• Zijuan (紫鹃) from the Yunnan Tea Research (云南省农科院茶叶研究所) [2]
• Taixiangzi (苔香紫; Moss Purple) from Zhejiang
• Da Hong Pao (大红袍) and Red Buddha’s Hand (红芽佛手) from Fujian

Since this is from Yunnan, it’s reasonable to assume that this is from the Zijuan variety.

According to the farmer that Cher got this from, this tea is from the 2019 Spring harvest in Lincang, Yunnan. The timing of the harvest is crucial because it’s important that the buds are opened just enough and just right in terms of ripeness. If the tea is harvested too early, the taste will be too weak and if it’s too late, the buds will be too open.

The tea is harvested by hand and since the timing is crucial, only about 1kg of buds can be harvested a day. The farmer also mentioned that because the buds have a lower water content compared to other types of tea leaves, you can’t use the traditional shaqing (kill green) methods. Instead, the teas are sun-dried to retain freshness and aroma [3].

The tea liquor was very light but super flavourful. It’s almost like a flavoured white tea – I found this to be very fruity and Cher described it as a non-sweet apple. I also found the tea to be extremely familiar despite not having tried it before – after some time, it hit me that this was basically a more natural version of Whittard’s Chelsea Garden. We even pulled out some Chelsea Garden – Cher is a woman of great tea resources, as I previously said – and we agreed that this was the natural version.

I loved this. The last time I drank Chelsea Garden, the flavourings were extremely present so I was overjoyed to find this.

 

The spent leaves looked like juicier versions of the dry buds. Still extremely pretty.

Shoutout to Cher who’s running her own tea brand (sourcing from the farmers that she became friends with). You can get this tea from her if you’re interested in trying this for yourself. I also bought her tea sample box [4] and when I try those teas, I’ll report back too.

Note

[1] The Chinese name really doesn’t specify the type of tea, it just says purple buds. The leaf itself isn’t oxidised so it’s like a white tea, but you can also age this so it could also be counted as a type of raw puer. Some people classify this as a puer because the buds are from a gushu puer tree, but I think the processing method implies that it’s closer to a white tea than a puer.

[2] Fun fact: Zijuan is also the name of a character in Dream of the Red Chamber! She serves Daiyu as a maid and her name means purple Rhododendron

[3] Hence me classifying this as a white tea instead of a puer.

[4] Don’t worry, it’s 100% not sponsored. I paid for this with my own money.