High Mountain Purple Tea

HOJO NEWSLETTER No.28 The High Mountain Purple Tea / 高山紫茶

We have released a very unique tea called High Mountain Purple Tea. This tea is from Lincang, Yunnan Province, China. We purchased it from a village situated about 30-50km from the Myanmar border, and the altitude of the tea garden is approximately 2000-2300m. In this high mountain village, they used to collect tea leaves from a particular variety of tea that the local people call purple tea. There are two possible reasons why this tea is called purple tea.

The stems of some leaves are purple

At a glance, the harvested tea leaves look more or less the same as ordinary tea. From a distance, we can scarcely tell whether it is purple tea. If we check each leaf closely, we can see that some stems have a purplish colour. Nevertheless, not all the stems are purple. Based on my observation, fewer than 10-20% of the leaves have this characteristic.

The colour of the tea is a dark, indigo blue

Another reason why this tea may be called purple tea is that, after processing, the mao-cha of this tea turns a very dark colour. It looks dark blue to purple. This may be due to a higher content of saponin or anthocyanin.

Purple tea is very difficult to pan-fry

Purple tea is known to be much stickier than ordinary tea. This could be due to its unique constituents, such as saponin or anthocyanin. For this reason, the processing of this tea is difficult. During pan-frying, the tea leaves easily get burnt. I have known about this tea for a few years. Yet I could not find any well-processed purple tea; every purple tea I could obtain had some degree of burnt flavour. In spring this year, when I was walking around the village looking for a manufacturer, I met a tea master who has really good skill in frying tea. I decided to purchase his purple tea because I confirmed that his mao-cha has no burnt flavour at all.

An extraordinary body

The main characteristic of this tea is its overwhelmingly strong body on the palate. This extent of body is quite rare even among pu-erh teas. When I put this tea in my mouth, the sweetness spread widely over my palate. The tea leaves have a slight honey-sweet note, although it is not very strong at the moment, since the tea is still very fresh. The honey-sweet flavour will increase significantly after the tea is kept for a few years. In fact, I have tried the mao-cha of High Mountain Purple Tea made in 2013, and I was impressed by its sweet honey note, although the tea had been kept for only a year.

High Mountain Purple Tea is different from Zi Juan Cha 紫絹茶

People generally associate purple tea with Zi Juan Cha 紫絹茶. However, High Mountain Purple Tea is a completely different variety from so-called Zi Juan Cha 紫絹茶. In 1985, a new tea variety was discovered on Nannuo Shan 南糯山. This tea had literally purple leaves, and it was not suitable for drinking since it gave an extremely astringent taste. Later on, a Yunnan institute carried out hybridization to produce Zi Juan Cha, which is purple in colour but not astringent. The new cultivar is called Zi Juan Cha 紫絹茶, and since then it has been widely planted in Yunnan. Zi Juan Cha 紫絹茶 is usually grown in tea plantations with modern agricultural methods, and thus it tends to give very little after taste.

http://news.t0001.com/2013/0130/article_157072.html

The High Mountain Purple Tea we collected from the mountains of Lincang has traditionally been drunk by the minority tribes. Some of the trees are quite old, and it is clearly a different variety of tea. Unlike Zi Juan Cha 紫絹茶, whose leaves are entirely purple, High Mountain Purple Tea looks almost like an ordinary tea variety. It has no astringency, and the taste is rather sweet and smooth.

For more about raw pu-erh tea, please see What Is Raw Pu-erh Tea?. Our raw pu-erh teas are available in our raw pu-erh tea collection.