Stray Leaves Tea

2022 Year of the Tiger YiWu Black Tea from Bitterleaf Teas was a surprise hit for me this year. It is a both delicious, and bulletproof for brewing.

For a black tea, the texture is well rounded and lingers nicely well past the first sip. The aroma has some floral notes, and the taste is both malty and bright. It is has sweet fruity note that lingers. Basically, an all round great black tea.

The material that goes into this tea is part of the reason it is so great. The team at Bitterleaf sourced these leaves for a Raw Puer, and then also made it into a white and black teas.

With the good quality of leaves, there really isn’t a bad way to brew this. My favourite is in a gaiwan, but I sometimes put a little bit into a larger pot and let it sit a while. I have forgotten it once or twice, and let it brew for a long time, and it was still tasty.

The leaves are machine roasted, giving a good consistency from batch to batch. I ended up buying three containers of it, as after finishing 100g in record time, I went back and bought more.

As this is typical of black tea made in Yunnan, it is a Dianhong ( 滇红 ). This type of black tea originated in Yunnan around the 1930s and has been in various levels of production since.

Dian is the name of an ancient kingdom that was established around 279 BCE and annexed by the Han dynasty around 109 BCE. While this tea has no direct connection to the Dian kingdom, it has made use of the Dian name. When the tea was first released in the 1930s, it was called Yunhong ( 云红 ), before being renamed a year later.