This page is a work in progress.
What kind of brewing vessel should I use?
There are two answers to this:
1) It depends
2) A porcelain vessel.
When it comes to the material of the vessel I advice against making this too complicated. For most of the teas I offer, there are two main points to consider: you don’t want too much muting and you want proper heat retention.
For the heat retention reason I rarely use vessels with a capacity (when empty) of below 180 ml. My tin pot is the exception to that rule (it has excellent heat retention, and no – you don’t need a tin teapot).
If in doubt, go for porcelain in the 180-250 ml range. If you are the type of person who finds porcelain “too basic”, let me remind you that Zeng Zhixian, when treating Li Huatang to the liquid gold that is the 50s QLC that the latter had participated in producing himself, opted for a porcelain pot.
Underfilling a larger vessel is fine. For tianjian material productions, especially loose leaf (or loosely pressed) ones, using smaller vessels is fine too.
The poorly lit (and composed) image below shows my (current and historical) go-to vessels for Anhua heicha. From left to right, back to front, they’re a (modern) nixing pot (~260 ml), an insulated glass bottle (~420 ml), a glass stovetop kettle (>1l), a porcelain gaiwan (~200 ml), a tin pot (~160 ml), a hongni pot (~230 ml), a zini pot (~230 ml) and a porcelain pot (~300 ml).
Two words about the ones I guess are the odd ones out: the glass flask and stovetop kettle. I use the former all the time when I’m out of the house, it’s fantastically versatile. I’ll either do a kind of bastardized gongfu where I pour into another cup, using a fork to avoid leaves escaping, or just grandpa brewing. Anhua heicha – particularly productions with coarser material – are very well suited for granda brewing, by the way. The stovetop kettle I only use occasionally, for boiling (excellent way to brew dust and sediment left behind from breaking up slices and cakes, more so for stuff with some age) which is an art in itself.
I should note that plenty of people brew these teas with smaller vessels than I do and are very satisfied with the resulting cup. I’m probably a bit of an outlier in terms of rarely going below 180 ml. For experienced drinkers of any type of tea, I think it will be fairly intuitive if the heat retention is a limiting factor or if the tea is really steeped out.
What about brewing parameters?
Counterintuitive as it may sound, if you’re completely new to Anhua heicha I recommend starting with more leaf than you think you need, and then gradually move your way down from session to session (good thing about these QLC slices – you’ll have enough for plenty of sessions!) until you hit the right spot for you.
Assuming a 180 ml porcelain vessel and a QLC with a mix of grade 2/3/4 material, I’d start with something like 12-15 grams (12 if the production is mostly grade 2, 15 if it’s mostly grade 4, more or less). Quick rinse, which is discarded. Longish first brew (1-1.5 minutes – though for tightly compressed stuff you might need to go up to twice as long), slightly shorter second and third brew. And then go by feeling from there.
(Tianjian material productions usually require less leaf. I brew those similar to how I would brew most liubao or sheng puer.)
Boiling water. Always boiling water.
Let me repeat the “it depends” part though. Except for the boiling water.
Does the teas need to rest after shipping?
It depend… just kidding. It is not strictly necessary, but my experience is these teas improve a lot after a rest period after shipping.*
I usually go with 2–4 weeks of resting time. Rule of thumb: Never shorter than 2 weeks, and at a minimum the same time it took for the package to arrive. I prefer to let them rest with humidity but don’t think it matters much if you add humidity during or after the rest period.
*That doesn’t mean they won’t improve after the same amount of time if couldn’t keep your hands off them after arrival, in case that’s unclear. And with the unit sizes of most of these teas, there’s no harm in trying them earlier.
Should Anhua heicha be stored with or without added humidity?
For the majority of Western storages: With added humidity. In terms of temperature and humidity I treat Anhua Heichas like I treat sheng puer. 69% or 72% bovedas, depending on what I happen to have at hand. If I were to pick one of those numbers, I’d go with 69%.
(Wu Jianli, founder of Liyuanlong, warns against going below 50% or above 75% relative humidity for long periods of time.)
I use mylar bags for storage. I don’t do heated storage, but if you do I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t try the same for Anhua heicha.
Be careful with added humidity if there are big temperature fluctuations in your storage.
QLC with jinhua - yay or nay?
This question comes up a lot, it seems to surprise many how common it is for huajuans to have jinhua (金花, “golden flowers). It surprised me too in the beginning, as I expected all anhei teas beside fuzhuans to not have any.
The fact of the matter - and I think anyone who has tried a reasonable number of huajuans with some age will agree - is that it is extremely common for huajuans to grow jinhua. It’s (typically) not by intention. Sometimes it happens during the production (likely during the “night dew” stage, after the logs have been wrapped and pressed and are exposed to sunny days and dewy nights), other times after the logs have been released on the market (i.e. in private storages).
The follow-up question is then whether or not the accident is a happy one. The only way to answer this is with another “it depends”. Jinhua will typically mellow out the tea a bit and I find that it suits certain profiles more than others.
Let’s round off with an appeal to authority:
1) Li Shengfu (Yongtaifu) confidently bragging about about the amount of jinhua, only to be disappointed when the prospective client ignorantly asks if the tea has gone mouldy (at around 1:45)
2) Xiao Hong on this question (estimates 90% of huajuans develop jinhua)
3) Xiao Yiping on this question
4) Baishaxi video on this (English machine translation subs)
Do you have some recommended resources for learning more about Anhua heicha?
Here’s a fairly loosely curated list of recommendations:
Resources in English:
- The Global Tea Hut issue of April 2019 is a nice place to start
- I also very much recommend the 2025 four-part documentary from Mango TV, “The Story of Anhua Dark Tea”. Freely available (with English subtitles) on their website. All episodes are well worth watching (press “Previous full content” on the right hand side to see all listed), but Episode 3 goes most into Qianliang production.
- Available on Youtube too, but without English subtitles.
- 走遍中国 安化黑茶 (Part 1, Part 2 - Youtube, English subtitles)
Resources in Chinese
Books/Printed works:
- 方圆之缘—深探紧压茶世界 (Zeng Zhixian’s 2001 book on compressed teas; probably the most famous “Anhua heicha book” as it brought this family of teas to a much wider audience. Out of print, difficult to find used copies.)
- 湖南黑茶 (Supposedly the first book (published after 1949) focused on Anhua heicha. Written by the late Professor Cai Zhengan, covering a broad range of topics related to Anhua heicha with lots of details on production standards etc. In Chinese, though all pictures come with an English caption)
- 《普洱·壶艺》 (Issue 48) (This issue of the Taiwanese magazine is focused on Qianliang tea)
- 《茶源地理：安化》(Anhua focused issue of Mainland magazine on tea; goes more in-depth on the major production regions (Furong/Gaoma/Yuntai) than other publications I have seen, nice mix of the bigger historical (large factory dominated) developments and more artisanal stuff – a very nice introduction.)
Videos: