The Gift of Tea from the Remote Anhui Mountains

A taste of the 2024 spring harvest of Anhui Wild Foraged Green brings us to the fresh air in middle of the mountains among the tea bushes. Light and refreshing, with hints of a floral aroma, we wonder what are the neighboring plants of the tea bushes that these wild foraged leaves originate from. This 2024 harvest tea has a subtle, yet noticeable depth at its core while still being quite gentle and refreshing. A beautiful summer tea, Anhui Wild Foraged Green will be one of our highlights at this month's Summer Morning Flow Tea Social & Tasting. 

 

The mountains of Jin Zai金寨 in Anhui, China (pictured above) are home to our two Anhui teas: Anhui Wild Foraged Green and Anhui Yellow. Making tea, particularly yellow tea, has been the family tradition for our Anhui farmer, Mr. Dai, for countless generations. He grew up learning these traditions before moving to Hangzhou, China in his early twenties where he trained and worked in making Dragonwell (Longjing) tea. 

 

Mr. Dai continues to make Dragonwell tea in Hangzhou as well as yellow/green tea in the Anhui village he grew up in, a village so remote in the mountains that they survived Japanese invasion. Not until the last decade or so was a paved road built to access the village, and the village’s population remains very small, as most younger folks have gone into cities to work. Mr. Dai and his brother are the last two people in the village who know how to make yellow tea and are willing to make it; they have no descendants to pass on this village tea-making tradition of over 1000+ years. He tells us that some of the ancient tea bushes in this region may be well over 1000 years old, and he recalls his great grandfather telling him that when he was a kid, his great grandfather pointed out all the 600 year-old bushes around the mountain to him.