From a Fuding hillside Chen Hui Yi visits each March
Chen Hui Yi has worked with this Fuding cooperative since 2017, when she first travelled north from Guangdong to study sun-withering with a family that has been picking Bái Háo Yín Zhēn on the same slopes for four generations. The garden sits around 620 metres above the coast near Diantou, where morning fog rolls in off the East China Sea and breaks against the ridge by mid-morning — a daily rhythm that Hui Yi credits for the cultivar’s slow sugar accumulation.
This lot was picked over three mornings in late March 2026, before the spring rains. Only the unopened bud and its protective sheath are taken — no leaf, no stem. The pickers move in single file along the contour, filling shallow baskets so the buds don’t compress.
Withering is the whole craft here. The buds spend roughly 48 hours on bamboo trays in open sun, brought indoors when the dew comes, then finished briefly at low heat to lock the moisture below five percent. There is no rolling, no oxidation step, no kill-green pan. Hui Yi describes the work as “watching, not making” — the tea is mostly decided by the weather of the week it was picked.
We receive this lot direct from the cooperative, and Hui Yi tastes every batch before it leaves Fuding. The five grams in this sample are cut from the same tin she keeps on her own shelf in Chaozhou.
The leaf, brewed
Quiet, hay-sweet, with a long cool finish.
dry leaf
Long straight buds, silver down intact — faint smell of dried hay and almond skin.
wet leaf
Buds plump to pale jade after rinse — aroma turns to wet straw and cucumber rind.
liquor
Pale champagne, slightly cloudy from bud trichomes — clears by the third steep.
aroma
Honeydew, raw oat, a thread of white flower that surfaces only above 80 °C.
taste
Soft sweetness up front, mineral middle like wet stone, a faint apricot-kernel note that builds over steeps.
finish
Cool, slightly powdery — a returning sweetness (huígān) at the back of the throat after thirty seconds.
Brewing
A method, not a recipe.
Method
gongfu
Ratio
5g / 100ml
Water temp
85 °C
First infusion
40s
Subsequent
6–8 steeps, adding ~15s each round; push to 90 °C from steep four.
Pour down the wall of the gaiwan, not over the buds — they bruise easily and turn bitter when agitated.
CH
Sourced by
Chen Hui Yi
Senior Tea Expert (White, Green & Yellow Tea Varieties)
