Jin Jun Mei — Golden Needle Wuyi Black Tea · Book-Style Box, 90 grams

The tea that reinvented Chinese black tea. 🍵🖤

Jin Jun Mei only dates to 2005, young by Wuyi standards, but it changed the entire category. Made from single golden buds, hand-picked, it takes a genuinely enormous number of buds to fill a tin. That's the whole reason it costs what it does.

In the cup: honey and dried fruit up front, a silky smooth body with none of the roughness you get in cheaper reds, and a sweet finish that lingers rather than dropping off. Golden-tipped leaf, and it shows in the liquor too, a bright amber rather than the deep red of older-style black teas.

Brewing

• 5g · 95°C · Gaiwan
• Rinse once, discard
• First infusion: 10 seconds
• Add 5 seconds each round · 8–10 infusions