Bought this unusual Vietnamese tea sometime last year, I think, or was it earlier this year? I lost track, but this was made from the winter 2019 harvest.
Chinese tea drinkers might be familiar with Ya Bao tea, which is usually made from the buds that have yet to open. I haven’t tasted such tea from China so I can’t make the comparison but from what I read online, Ya Bao could be classified as white tea or pu’er. Ermmm..
Confusing details aside, Hanoi-based Viet Sun Tea offers the explanation that this tea called Mong Rong, or Dragon Claw, is a type of Ya Bao tea made from the axillary buds of non-Sinensis tree varietals. These buds emerge in the winter and will eventually develop into branches.
Apparently there are currently six varietals that are believed to be used to produce this type of tea in Vietnam but there could be more. The varietal used to make this particular tea grows yellow-orange axillary buds and pink-red flowers. Fascinating!
This tea is from a high elevation area of around 2,000m in the Quan Bạ district of Ha Giang, which is a very remote area with small numbers of this type of tree growing. So the raw material is limited, which makes it difficult to produce this tea regularly or annually.
That makes this packet of 25g tea very precious.
I followed the recommended brewing parameters using 3g of tea per 100ml of hot water and steeped for one minute.
The resulting tea liquor looked like plain water, like, really light and transparent. Only from certain angle and under natural lighting could I see the very light yellow tinge.
However, it didn’t taste plain at all. It was full of fruity sweetness with a slight pepper note. The texture was smooth and the sweetness lingered in the mouth.
There’s no such thing as oversteeping this tea. I left it for 5 minutes and even 10 minutes and it just got better each time. To get more out of the buds, I even boiled it after the fifth steeping, and it continued to give and give for up to 10 steepings. Even then the sweetness did not mellow, but that was all the tea I could take in a day.
The used buds were still tightly encased after that. It’s really amazing, and really soooo good! I didn’t even feel tea drunk or anything after so many cups of the tea.
Also could see how orange the buds were.
Viet Sun Tea sells teas from wild growing areas and many are produced from tea trees hundreds of years in age. Along with this Ya Bao tea, I had bought a white tea and a dark tea, both which I intend to age longer before drinking. So that’s something to look forward to in a year or more. Hehe.
茶柱 The Floating Tea Stem 