Dark tea

Although I haven’t trid this before, I know the Anhua Dark Tea is very famous one. You can try this.

Hei cha?

I love it. Hunan, anhua, tian jian, three cranes, Ben se ju, The one in bamboo, also tibetan kang tea (is this hei cha? I don’t quite know). I love it!

I have just bought the really expensive 1980s tian jian from chawangshop.com to try but I’m going to air it for a year first

I just posted a review of a Fu brick Hunan hei cha an hour ago (the kind with “golden flowers,” a type of fungus). I reviewed a Hunan brick tea without that type of aspect added (it’s intentionally inoculated), and another hei cha, a Liu Bao, not long ago as well. I drink different teas, just not that type so much (beyond pu’er, if you consider it the same thing, which I’ll skip ruling on here), but it finally came up to explore those further.

http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.com/2017/09/yi-qing-yuan-factory-hunan-fu-brick-tea.html

It would only be a distinction that is interesting to people who are into tea trivia but pu’er isn’t considered a form of hei cha or “dark tea” by everyone. The reasoning is that sheng (raw pu’er) isn’t pre-fermented in the same way other versions of hei cha are, so it only becomes “dark” (fermented) through an aging process. Rather than try to specify the moment it goes from not dark to dark some people would rather just think of it as something else, just as sheng. Shou (pre-fermented pu’er, also called cooked, wet-piled to ferment over a short time period) really should be the same type of thing as dark tea, and per my understanding the processing draws on Liu Bao processing (a tea type also called Luk Bok), another type of hei cha. If someone thought both sheng and shou are hei cha they wouldn’t necessarily be wrong, it’s just not quite that clear, and different people use that category division in different ways.

Is dark tea similar to balck tea?

Dark tea is a translation of hei cha, but then “black tea” seems to be an alternative literal (direct) translation. Hong cha (red tea) correctly translates as black tea (fully oxidized tea), per the expression for that used in English. It almost seems as well to keep saying hei cha to avoid confusion, although it sounds strange to me when people keep saying hong cha when we have a term for that: black tea. I really don’t get “red oolong” either, but there may or may not be something to that.

Dian Hong is a personal favorite (of black tea, we’re still on, hong cha and not hei cha). Here is another source for it, from a vendor located in Yunnan, so related to buying it relatively directly: https://www.farmer-leaf.com/collections/yunnan-black-tea

It really doesn’t work to judge tea quality from a picture and vendor description, of course, you have to try the tea.