World's Most Prized Yellow Tea

Haiti has desist on from a leaf in this video the world's most prized yellow tea in this video I'm gonna taste jinshanling gen the world's most revered yellow tea and we're going to be shining a spotlight on this tea so that you can make better buying decisions when you're looking for these kinds of high ticket teas this video is going to go under the tea master classes and the single tea tastings playlists if any point in time you enjoy this video then make sure you hit it with a thumbs up the more thumbs in the air the more tea videos are gonna come your way and if you haven't subscribed to our YouTube channel yet go click that button welcome it's Saturday in London and it's a good day for me because I get to taste Jinshan yangchen the world's most revered yellow tea before we get into it let's take a step back and talk about yellow teas in general rare is an often overused word in the tea industry but certainly yellow tea is the most rare type of tea being produced it is produced in tiny quantities when you compare it with all the other types of tea and gin Xiang Ying Chen sits at the top of the pile and authentic Jin Shan Ying Chen the really really really authentic stuff from Jin Shan Island is probably the most rare tea type produced yellow tea is produced in a very similar way to green tea so the picking is very similar very fine picking and then the leaves go through a very brief shade withering phase before it goes through the fixing phase or the kill green phase and in that phase the leaf is heated up to above 150 above 200 degrees Celsius around there and that deactivates enzymes in the leaf which catalyze oxidation so it fixes it in its green state but with yellow tea the heating is done in a very controlled way usually it's done from kind of warm to hot and that means that there is a phase where the enzymatic action is actually accelerated before they become deactivated afterwards the leaf is baked to reduce the moisture and then it goes through the men Huang phase and the men Huang phase is the yellowing phase which sets this tea type apart from green tea in is quite a lot and long process it involves basically leaving the leaves in a moist environment so that the oxidation continues but it's non enzymatic oxidation is just caused by the moisture in the air and different yellow teas will have different ways of doing this but with this jinshanling gem what they will do the producers is after they've gone through the initial fixing shaping and baking of the the tea leaves the tea leaves or the tea buds will be at around 60 to 70% humidity they will wrap the leaves up in paper and they will keep it in a warm environment wrapped up for about 24 hours around a day and this is it all depends on the the environmental conditions of course but they'll leave it wrapped up for about a day then they'll take it out they'll bake it again so that means that whilst it was wrapped up in that moist environment the moisture evened out so after the first baking that the outside of the buds are dry but the moisture still is inside these buds or leaves so it evens out so then they go through another baking phase at a lower temperature probably around kind of 50 60 degrees and then the process of wrapping is repeated so they'll wrap it up again and paper and they'll leave it again for one to two days and that process will start to yellow the tea it will reduce the greenness it will reduce those green notes in the tea and it makes the tea rounder and slightly softer and it changes just the fragrance of the tea after the second round of wrapping or non enzymatic oxidation then the leaves are baked again and sometimes it goes through another round but usually at that point it will be baked to dry and that is the very basic process for making yellow teas obviously after the drying phase it will go through a sorting phase where skilled workers will basically pick out any twigs or large leaves that they don't want in the final product and because the t-type is so arduous to make taking four to five days from picking to finishing it is done by very few producers and a lot of yellow tea that is sold as yellow tea on the market is actually much more close to a green tea and they don't go through such an extended men1 process so there's your little recap on yellow tea right let's focus in on this tea this is June shiny engine top of the pile of yellow teas there's only a handful of yellow teas being made the other one that we stock is horse and Hanyu which is a very classic yo tea probably the second most produced yellow tea out there we call it amber Mountain I'll put a link in the description below if you want to do a yellow tea a bee with this against anther mountain it's really really interesting it might be something that you may want to do so amber mountain or Porsha and Tonya comes from Ann Cloyd province but jinshan Ying Chen comes from Hunan Province so Hunan Province the home of fiery cuisine lots of chilies and an area in Hunan province is daunting Lake and within daunting Lake although it's kind of not really within daunting Lake it's basically connected to the mainland is Jun shun Island and Jin Shan Island is traditionally where authentic Jin Chun yen Chen should be made so Jin Shan Island also known as lovers Island is basically just about connected to the mainland you can actually drive from the mainland to Jin Shan Island but during some months I think the summer months if the the river floods and so it is cut off as an island it's a very small island it measures less than one square kilometre in area so very very small island and it is a great growing environment for T and this T comes from the Tang Dynasty so it has a long history and is traditionally produced in or on Jin Shan Island jun-chan Island is very low altitude but it has very high humidity it's got low temperature it's got very very rich soil and it has old teacher and as we know all the tea trees just have a little bit more potency in terms of their flavor body and effects and so this area jinshan this island is where the authentic true jinshan engine should come from however chun qiang is a tiny island and the plantation the plantations on that island are state-owned they're owned by one group and so there is a monopoly on this plantation and therefore to buy tea from jin shan island is extremely difficult to do and very expensive this is true tribute II so this is a state-owned plantation the island which used to be a Taoist retreat is actually uninhabited so there's only a very small number of workers who know how to make this tea who come onto the island to produce this tea it has very strict controls in its picking you can only pick buds that have not been out there have not opened up into leaves it has to be picked exactly at the right time there can't be any do it because you can't pick after rain it's extremely extremely controlled and then you've got the yellowing process which only a handful of people know how to do it's very very very controlled and therefore most of the T goes to government officials or is gifted to diplomats you can purchase this tea but you are talking eye watering prices and so I would say that the majority of gin shun young gen out there on the market especially on the international market is not authentically from Jun shun it may be possible that they take the kind of second pickings engine shun and that may happen but the leaves and the tea trees are protected so you don't want too much picking and therefore if you want any kind of quantity of jin cheng yaojin then you need to go outside of Jin shun but most tea sellers will not tell you this most tea sellers will say that there T is from Jin Chun and this can be for a variety reasons it could be because they've just been told that by the wholesaler that sold it to them or the farmer or the producer if they managed to get that close to source or it may be that they found out but everyone else in the tea market is selling their Junction engine as authentically from jingshan and therefore you don't want to seem to be selling inferior tea and so you kind of follow the crowd a little bit so I'm gonna state categorically now this jinshanling jen is not from jun-chan Island okay if you want to find jinshan engine from jingshan island you are going to be paying an absolute premium snob price 100% you're going to be paying top top whack we are talking I would say if you see that anything that's less than say about 70 or 80 dollars for 10 grams 70 to 80 dollars for 10 grams of gin Shannon Jen then I would say it's impossible that it comes from jingshan Island I would say that I'm being very conservative they're actually true jun-chan Island proper pickings so not pickings that were done later in the year that they can then ascribe the origin of jinshan Island but proper early spring preaching ming pickings of ginseng engine will be eye-watering ly expensive and so the vast majority of tea sellers who have jinshanling gen are knowingly or unknowingly not selling tea produced on jinshan island if they were the prices would be astronomical and they would be making a very loud song and dance about the fact that they source from jingshan Island it wouldn't just be a one-liner in terms of origins written on a website but if you go to who none you go to other areas around Hunan close to daunting Lake then there are plenty of sellers who are selling jinshan engine style tea and they are mostly telling people that their tea comes from Jin Shan Island so there's a lot of fakery there's a lot of fits being told that means that they can mark up their prices but the tea seller who buys it thinks that they're getting a pretty good deal for proper Jun Shanti and so they mark up their prices and price match with just under people who are having authentic jinshan tea and so you get to this point where the prices are escalating far too high and so categorically again this is not from jin shan island and the price reflects that but what we try to do it may leaf is what I call buying on the knee so if you imagine a graph where you've got quality on the y-axis and price on the x-axis usually there's a quite a linear response between you know the price and the quality usually depending on the tea it's relatively linear and then it reaches what I call the knee which is where the price goes up extremely sharply because of some snob factor some stop value because it comes from a certain field or whatever but the quality is only incremental so from this point here the price has gone very high but the actual quality is very the quality difference is incremental so what we like to do at Mei leaf is buy on that knee where the price to quality ratio is optimum it's different for different teas but we tried the whole range especially the top top range and we've basically figure out where the incremental change is very very small but the price difference is large that's where we purchase so that we can get you the best quality tea at the best deal and I have to say I have tasted authentic Junction engine I have had that opportunity it is a spectacular tea however when you look at the price in my opinion Jun Xiang Ying Chen from Jin Shan is overrated I'm sure that there's going to be a lot of people that want to argue with me on that but I think the price you pay for it compared to the taste in the mouth the actual experience when you strip away all the snob factor of it I don't think worth the price that you pay we're talking huge huge figures here and this is the case with lots and lots of tees where you kind of taste through the different revered fields the revered growing areas you taste the revered tea trees and you know you find that the price point has been set a lot more about the story and the rarity of the tea rather than the quality of the experience so having said that it's time to dive into this jun-chan engine which we call diamond peak I'm going to give you all the information that you need to know about this tea and then we're gonna taste it it's tasting time okay here it is Jun Xiang Ying Chen I've showed you the leaves already and what you'll notice is that it's predominantly buds but there are quite a few buds and one leaf here so this is not the strict Jun shun Island picking here that's one of the tell-tale signs if you see any buds with leaves chances are it's not going to come from Jin Shan Island so this is buds and buds in one leaf color is slightly yellowed especially the buds and you're looking at kind of moss greens those kinds of greens here but still a very very pretty very fine picked tea you can see it's extremely fine picking tea almost like a very fine green tea picking the season for this is early spring it has to be early spring we've spoken about this before spring tea the first flush of the season suit these types of tea very very well this was picked on the 29th of March so preaching Ming before the Ching Ming festival which is usually around the 4th of April which is the you know calendar time anything preaching Ming is considered to be top top grade early spring pick T so 29th of March 2017 the cultivar here is the Kunti John cultivar which is a traditional cutter bar for that area the origin here very important is it's from Hunan but it's not from Jin Shan Island this is from P and yang province which is very close by daunting Lake Pyongyang Province still close to the U a young city which is where all of the Jin Shan engine is produced around that area so not from Jin Shan stating that very categorically the picking here is as I said buds and bud and one leaf so very fine picking the processing for it let's quickly recap the processing because it is very arduous it's a very long processor it's worth you appreciating that that they pick the leaves they shade whether the leaves for a few hours four to five hours that develops flavor and starts to reduce some of the moisture then it will go through it's very controlled a heating phase I believe that this has been baked and not pan fired by the taste on it I'm not sure 100% on that but it'll be around 200 degrees something like that where they deactivate the 200 degrees Celsius I have to say where they deactivate the enzyme but it'll be done in a very slow controlled way after that the leaves will be a left to cool for a bit before being baked and it will be baked over charcoal a bamboo baked bamboo baskets baked over charcoal very very careful process to reduce the moisture down down so they want to reduce the moisture down to about 60% after that they'll wrap the leaves up usually in kind of 1 kilo amounts wrap it up in paper and they will put it in a warm humid environment and that's the yellowing process so at this point the moisture will still allow a slow oxidation so it's not going to go dark reds or blacks like it does with alongs and black teas instead it's just going to slowly change to a yellowing process it's kind of similar to if you have a green tea and you leave it in a humid environment for a few months you'll start to see that it goes yellow so it's this yellowing process but if you do that with a green tea over that period of time then what happens is you're losing a lot of the vibrancy and freshness of the tea what you want to do with yellow tea is lock in that freshness but then add this kind of rounded softer knows that comes through very slight oxidation after it's been left for one to two days in this warm environment wrapped up it'll then be baked again at a lower temperature to reduce the the moisture content down again to maybe about thirty percent it will then go through the wrapping phase for another one to two days before finally being baked dry over charcoal and then it's sorted so that's your process it's a very long arduous process which is why yellow tea is produced in such small quantities the elevation for this is actually about 200 ish 250 meters which is a lot higher than Jin Shan Island so Jin Shan Island has relatively low altitude kind of hundred meters or lower and this presence produced in the outlying areas you can afford to add that bit of altitude which is a good thing right now brewing method for this I've got my a hundred mill guy one here I'm just gonna warm it up and I'm actually gonna brew this at 75 degrees which i think is 165 Fahrenheit for two minutes now it's very rare that you see me brewing tea for that period of time normally we're talking 10 20 30 seconds but I've experimented a lot with this tea and it's one of those Goldilocks ease you've just got to get it when she once you nail it once you nail the brewing on it it sings but if you kind of over steep it by putting water which is too hot so a lot of the standard advice with with a jinshanling Chen is to brew it at about 85 degrees and to brew it for a short period of time maybe 30 seconds I found that that brings out a little bit too much of the warmth and a little bit too much of the astringent sea and I found that 75 degrees for two minutes is for me the perfect way to make this team sing let's give it a smell I get a very rich marzipan note so almonds sugar there's a slight tang there as well a fruity tank in China they have Hawthorn fruits and you have these thorn sweets which are kind of tangy and sweet and the smell of the dry leaf really reminds me I'm picking up this tag and I'm picking up the the marzipan I'm also picking up kind of a slight creaminess very familiar to white tea lovers out there so anybody who knows by moved on and that slight creamy note to it that's definitely they're not as rich as a bar move done but the yellowing process I think has given the tea that creaminess right we're gonna give it a very brief rinse let the pig have a drink I'm just gonna warm up a little bit of the tea way here as well now take that off make sure it doesn't stew with these teas is all about being very delicate and so I put 3.5 grams of tea to a hundred mill and as I said with these kinds of teas you know these kinds of teams are very very pernickety you need to make sure you get the parameters right for your tastes obviously and so everybody's different let's give these wet leaves our smell getting some more vegetal notes yeah I'm getting some vegetal notes here so it's still got the marzipan it's still got the creaminess it's still got but the creaminess is now it's expressing more fruits now fruits like not so much Hawthorn more green fruits we're talking berries of some sort green berries grapes gooseberries those kinds of things nuttiness but then also a vegetal kind of spinachy-- nature to it as well right I need a stopwatch here so let me just get that ready and we're going to be brewing this as I said for two minutes here we go there we go some people don't like to cover it I think it suits covering when you're brewing at this low temperature 75 degrees I think it suits covering personally but you know that's my personal opinion on it so as I said I have tried Jin Shan Jin Chen from Jin Shan Island and it was an excellent tea don't get me wrong it was an excellent tea however for the price I felt it was certainly not worth it it's a very light is a very elegant tea it's got a nice you you're looking for those subtleties you're looking for that extra bit of body you're looking for that extra bit of sweetness compared to your run-of-the-mill high grade but teas and and it's there but as I said I think it's incremental when you compare it to the price leap compared to this tea here for me there's no question this is a much better price to quality ratio by a long shot now I'd be interested to hear what you guys think if any of you have tried an authentic Jin Shan made definitely from Jin Shan Island and there will be I think relatively few of you that have a taste of that and because it's mostly reserved for the diplomats mostly reserved so when I tasted it it was through diplomatic channels it wasn't through my tea purchasing channels because I do a lot of work in China with the Chinese government and so I was lucky enough to get a small taste of it but if you have tasted it then great let me know your thoughts do you agree with me that it's slightly overrated or very overrated or do you think it's worth the price okay we're approaching one minute 45 here so I'm gonna go back to my camera app make sure I'm in focus and we are gonna finally gets a taste to this tea sorry about the long winded intro to this but I think it's really important that you guys understand this tea a little bit better because it's often misrepresented again warm notes almost slight treacle notes in there like burnt sugar notes in there which is again very different from a green tea so this is where that yellowing processes and in my opinion this could even being yellowed even more a lot of the time they're shortening the yellowing process I mean it's becoming more and more green these yellow teas is something that I'm trying to kind of you know tell people not to do tell my fans please please yellow it fully I think that this has been yellowed well but it could have been stretched even a little bit more let's err show you this color and then you can see the yellowing here right so it is a kind of them in my tasting notes I wrote yellow diamonds really clear really vibrant nice hue it's got the greens in there but it's definitely more yellow than your average green tea and especially your average bud green tea I can see quite a lot of activity in there the hairs on the buds definitely have stripped off a little bit even though I went through a filter and it's got good body jinshanling Jen cheers everybody I can see that the the body here is nice medium to thick definitely medium to thick and a flavour when you brew it like this it just it's it's exactly what you want right if you brew it too short I found with these teas you're just searching you're searching for it you you get this very ephemeral very fleeting notes of deliciousness you can oh it's there but then it's gone with this the body is thicker it's persistent and very fragrant let's try to dig into those fragrances a little bit here so one of the things that I noticed which really struck me when I first tasted this tea was that it has a kind of minerality like a winter minerality so if you've ever being skiing or snowboarding in you you get off that that ski lift at the top of that mountain the first time and you've got that your staff is kind of them frosting up with snow and you just get that taste in your mouth that very fresh snowy mountain air this tea bizarrely enough reminds me of that then once you get past that you've got fruit and the fruit ISM is is actually relatively tropical with in my opinion we're talking star fruits we're talking guava quite light fruits not particularly sweet more the kind of watery kind of tropical fruits yeah I get guava I get star fruit and then there's nuttiness and this is where the yellowing processes come in and the nuttiness is is a reminiscent of them not nuts but more seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds those kinds of nutty warm notes there is a creaminess to it as well like a kind of fruity creams like goose berry fool and a certain spice a little spice of tying pepperiness in there a little bit I'm getting a vanilla note to with that creaminess it's a remarkable tea when you brew it in this way the body is satisfying the persistence the juiciness on the sides of my tongue it's very very very apparent if you brew this short and hot you get a very dry finish you get a very fleeting sense of the aromatics that I talked about they're there but they're fleeting and if you go over 90 degrees then you're getting into the real kind of warm notes maybe that suits you but I don't think it does this tea justice and in my opinion I'm just going to brew another another round so I'm adding 15 seconds to this but I'm gonna probably not set my stopwatch I'll just look at my clock here I'm probably gonna get it wrong but around that and so when I compare this tea to my memory and it is memory so I'm not a being but if I compare this tea to my memory of the jinshan island grown chin Xiang Ying Chen I would say that the differences are very incremental maybe a little bit sweeter on the June Shell Island tea perhaps a little bit thicker in terms of its body those are probably the two main differences of persistence of sweetness and extra thickness on body but in terms of the general aromas and general fragrance that's coming off this tea I think that this stands up next to authentic Chen Xiang Ying Chen authentic Jin Shan island grown in Jen I should say because at the end of the day there's a there is no definition now for what makes Jin Shan Ian Jenn it's kind of like a style of making tea I'm in the same way that Peking duck or Beijing duck is a style of making duck I do think that the best Jin Shan Ian Chen comes from Hunan and I actually haven't seen any jinshanling gem that hasn't come from Hunan but you know you know if you want to be really a stickler about it can we call this Jin Shan engine if it doesn't come from Jin Shan Island I leave that up to all of you people out there to argue but as long as I'm clear to you where it comes from feel like I've done my job all right so I'm gonna guess that was about two minutes two minutes fifteen the great thing is when you brew it this temperature you don't have to stress too much about the time you could easily leave it three minutes and it's not gonna over over stew but try to follow these parameters first and see how you get on I will show you the wet leaves now because they are beautiful here let me just fluff them out a bit here you go you can still see the yellowing here but obviously it's become more vibrant and I would say that the palate is much more kind of lime greens right so line yellows and lime greens the rind and to the flesh of the line I would say that that is a rare good description and you can see that they are predominantly buds and buds and one leaf so very very fine picking a lot of people like to brew this in glass so they can see the movement of the buds that's something that you may want to do as I said you may want to a be this against Horsham fungi which is our amber mountain if you do I would suggest that you brew it in the same way so ignore the brewing instructions on the pack and we're thinking of changing them actually but brew it in the same way 75 degrees for two minutes for the first infusion and add 30 seconds and you'll notice the difference very very clear difference this is a lot fresher than the Huashan Ponyo this this this is why I think this is pan bake sorry this is baked air bait and not pan fried because there's a different note to it and it would be interesting for you to do that a B this is brighter this is more reminiscent of those Bud green teas like your sich one green teas your Citroen budget ease or what we sell as naked spring so those kind of very fresh very vibrant very late winter early spring tastes it doesn't have the same raw astringent see the green raw astringency that those green teas that have because of this yellowing process because of this this men1 process which just takes that edge off rounds it out makes it a little bit rounder a little bit warmer a little bit creamier and a little bit nuttier mmm smell of the empty cup the fragrance is amazing smell of the empty cup miss let it let it drive it because this is not super hot water it doesn't evaporate so quickly so just let it dry let the water dry off so that the oils on the leap on the in the liquor can coat this nice tulip shape cup and I get this tangy sweet tang apricots dried apricots apricot jam is I think what I wrote in my tasting notes I've get that very very strong again some of that cooked sugar so the jam eNOS is there yeah I'm kind of repeating myself that cooked sugar treacle apricots very nice is definitely tangy more of the dried fruit note rather than the fresh noon fresh fruit note which is what you'd expect considering it's not coming from the wet leaves which are much fresher very perfume now I'm getting flowers very very light flowers going down those tropical light white flowers mmm really really really nice the nuttiness is there and you still get that lovely bouquet of fruits as well so that's it Jun shun Yun Chen I hope that this video has given you a more expansive knowledge of this tea so that you can make the right buying decisions when you are seeking out this highly revered and very very small batch produced yellow tea that's the tea heads if you made it to the end of this video then make sure you hit it with a thumbs up check out our YouTube playlist and let us know if there are any videos that you would like us to make if you're ever in London then come visit us in Camden to say hi and taste our wares if you have any questions or comments then please fire them over other than that I'm done from Mei Lee thank you for being a part of the revelation of true tea stay away from those tea bags keep drinking the good stuff and spread the word because nobody deserves bad tea bye you

Channel: Mei Leaf

Views: 20,119

Keywords: tea, mei leaf, don mei, loose leaf tea, green tea, yellow tea, websites for tea, tea tasting, tea shopping, high quality tea, chinese tea, japanese tea, tea ware, teaware, tea gifts, gong fu tea, gong fu brewing, junshan, jun shan, junshan yinzhen, jun shan yin zhen, jun shan needle tea, yellow tea processing, how to brew yellow tea, hunan tea, huo shan huang ya, golden needle, junshan island tea, tribute tea, most expensive tea, bud tea, what is yellow tea

Id: rGPjrQVacpA

Length: 35min 9sec (2109 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 20 2018