PANLAN 105 | yancha oolong

PANLAN 105 is a huang guan yin cultivar yancha ("rock tea") from lower Wuyi, Fujian province, China. This early spring production was hand-plucked, sun-withered, manually bruised to light oxidation (think qi lan / bai ji guan), pan-fried to fix, shaped by hand in cloth sacks, and aggressively roasted in 3 rounds over charcoal pits in the classic rock tea style. Shan, our producer at Panlan tea farm, is old school—he roasts with a heavy hand, taking as much pride in his raw material as his process, and ensuring his teas will age gracefully (light roast yancha being more prone to staling). Roasted in mid-May, this lot has spent the last month airing out and settling into our storage climate. Developed in the 1980's, huang guan yin tea trees (also referred to as "105"), are a genetic cross between jin guan yin (itself a cross between tie guan yin and huang jin gui) and huang jin gui. Mouthful, right? Interestingly, most modern tea cultivars are cross-breedings of original (or "mother") tr