To my taste, this is the second best green tea I’ve had so far this year. It’s slightly below the Long Jing, but much higher than Bi Luo Chun.

Anhui China is home to a few famous green teas, most notably Tai Ping Hou Kui (which I brought in last year) and Huangshan Mao Feng.

Mao Feng translates to ‘Fur Tips’ and is a young spring tea with a generous blanket of white pekoe. It’s not heavily rolled as to preserve its shape, therefore the incredibly green notes of some other teas are not present. It’s also a bud based tea, so you shouldn’t go into drinking this expecting a tonne of flavor.

The flavor set revolve around asparagus and a simple ‘sugarcane’ sweetness. Using increasingly higher temperature water makes the asparagus note taste overcooked and introduces rapini brocolli/watercress notes. That being said, even using boiling water results in an enjoyable cup, though you may want to lower the temperature to 80 degrees or so as the initial temperature. Longer steeping times bring out toasty-seedy notes akin to pumpkin seeds.

My best recipe for it used 4.6g of tea : 330mL water, the water was brought to rolling boil and then cooled down in a glass carafe for 30 seconds before using it, eventually steeping for 3 minutes and 45 seconds. I felt the flavor was especially good about 4 and a half minutes after brewing, when the tea cooled down, and the painful sting of the hot tea was no longer a factor.

Regarding the label art. It started to come together when I connected the aroma to sugarcane. I started thinking about how I’d utilize sugarcane in the image and I recalled this video:

I thought since it looks so similar to bamboo, and it’s a Chinese tea, why not use a panda as the mascot? Asparagus is an obvious reference to the main flavor, but then the name I thought was especially funny. ‘Furry’ stems from the anthropomorphized panda, but the Chinese text is even better. I opened my Chinese dictionary on my phone to learn the stroke order to write yellow (huang) when the second definition stated that ‘yellow + color’ comes off as ‘pornographic’. I ran it by some Chinese friends, they all said it must be an old expression that isn’t used anymore, and that Chinese is very contextual, so the way I have it written as Yellow + color + Mountain really just means yellow color mountain. I’ll stick with it anyway, imagining the name to read along the lines of  ‘The Furry Tips of Obscene Mountain’.