Jiu Qu Hong Mei

This is a black tea grown where black tea has no business being.

The bushes are Longjing plants, the same ones that make Hangzhou's famous green, growing near West Lake among gardens that have made green tea for a thousand years. Here they are taken all the way through oxidation instead.

The dried leaf twists into thin dark curls that the makers compare to red plum blossom, which is where the name comes from. The oxidation runs deep, closer to a heavy oolong than to a standard black. It pours bright and sharp with fruit, plum and apple, and almost no dryness at all.