Making Pu'er Tea in Nannuo Mountain, Yunnan | CHINA SOURCING TRIP

Hey friends, in this video we'll be spending time in Nenwu Mountain. Nenwu Mountain is in Menghai County in Xishuangbanna Prefecture of southern Yunnan. Let's meet my old friend Da'e and her son Mumu, explore their tea gardens, talk about what's going into their tea production, and choose the right tea for this year's release. Nenwu Mountain may win the title of the most accessible Pu'er tea area. For tourists, it's the path of least resistance to a selfie with ancient trees, picking up a tea cake as a memento, and even a photo op with some tribal folk in full regalia. For elite connoisseurs that seek rare teas from remote villages, however, Nenwu seems way too obvious and easy. Therefore, it's often one of the first terroirs to be dismissed. But if you venture past those roadside stops and into the villages tucked further into the mountain range, you can find outstanding gardens and talented producers who aren't charging high prices. I believe Nenwu Mountain isn't just a gateway tea mountain, it's a source of high quality tea hidden in plain sight. So we're here with Da'e, this is her ancestral stone village tea gardens, and across the ridge here, just right up the hill, going down, that's that's the Banpo Lao Chai, so that's Banpo, that's like the main garden, the main terroir taste that you associate with Nenwu Shan tea. And yeah, so we're here harvesting, this is like March 24th, and what I love about these harvests is that even though there's a plucking standard of one bud, three leaves, four leaves, it's really just a snapshot of this time of year, or rather this little sliver of a day. They'll just go out and they'll harvest every day and it's just like whatever buds and leaves they have, that's what they're going to harvest and that's the tea that you get. So it's really just a snapshot of the ecology at a specific time. This specimen here is said to be upwards of 300 years old. There are specimens that are over 500 years old in this garden. Oh, she said 500 years. Oh, wow. Okay, so, excuse me, 500 year old. You can get a shot of this trunk, super, super thick trunk. That might be the better way to age a tree, is the diameter of its trunk rather than the height. Yeah. The story of rivers and lakes in Nenwu Mountain started with meeting Da'a during a trip in 2019. There's a whole adventure tale to be told at another time. The main takeaway is that without the solidness of the connection I made with her as a kind of kindred spirit, something that felt more special than merely a business collaboration, I wouldn't have had the confidence to start this sourcing project to begin with. Let's fast forward to 2024 and pick up the story there. Okay, so now we begin the story of Mumu. This is her son. He's 22 years old, and this family has been struggling really hard since the pandemic started. Da'a, she built this tea factory in 2019. Her business was starting to do better after this divorce that she had, which is sort of like this sort of scandalous thing that I'll get into in a little bit. But she was building her own tea factory for herself, and then boom, the pandemic hit, and then everyone stopped buying tea. And so she had all these payments to make on this tea factory, and ever since, she's been struggling. And so I have this bond with her because I've been kind of keeping tabs. And since our economy wasn't in the same similar place, I was like, hey, I'm going to still keep buying tea from you. And so I was helping support her in a humble way. It wasn't like I was buying tons and tons of tea, but I was still a consistent customer to her. Anyway, Da'a and her family haven't been doing so well, but going back to this separation that she had from Mumu's father, who apparently was an abusive alcoholic, she, going against tribal customs, left him and felt a lot of shame for that. He remarried, and all the assets that they had bought together went to him and his new wife, basically. And so that included a few acres, actually a good amount of acreage of this Bama region of Nanwa, which is really, really coveted, as well as this massive 700-year-old tree that if you make a single tree from that tree, you're going to get a lot of income from that. And so a lot of her price, possessions, and resources that she collaborated on with her former husband left her family unit and went to this new situation with him and his new wife. He actually died from liver cirrhosis two years ago. She was telling me about it. I was like, my God, what? And now, in February, since his new wife remarried somebody, all those resources went back to his sons in Da'a, basically. And so it's this really awesome story where we arrive in March, and the family's kind of celebrating, but are still sort of living in relative squalor, honestly. It's a pretty rough condition, but they're on the up and ups. And this is Mumu hugging the trunk of this really, really big 700-year-old tree. And there's the Cha Wong of Nanwa Mountain, which means tea king, which is 800-year-old tree. And if that tree dies, this will be the new Cha Wong, and that will fetch staggering prices. So who knows? I mean, we're not going to wish death on the Cha Wong or anything, but if that does happen, Da'a's family makes a complete 180, and they're doing really, really, really well. So the Hani people of Nanwa Mountain, or as they refer to themselves as the Aka people, have over 1,000 years of traceable tea stewardship ancestry here. And nothing symbolizes this kind of one foot in the old world and one step moving forward into the future than just being here with this 700-year-old tree that's inherited by Mumu, Da'a's 23-year-old son. All right, so we're here checking out this Gao Gan Shu. This is a tall poultry. This is in Stone Village, Da'a's ancestral gardens. Not sure how old this tree is, but just check out the girth of this trunk. And so what they mean by tall poultry is that it's just shooting up towards the canopy, and the otherwise somewhat diminutive understory shrub that is Camellia sinensis, it's superseding that role ecologically and has somehow gathered the resources here to compete in that way for other trees like what we're seeing is banyan trees, walnuts, chestnuts, some other ones I'm unfamiliar with. These trees produce a very expensive tea because not only is there a demand for something like that on a concept level, but the labor of sourcing one guy who's really good at taking the risk to harvest this small amount of tea, yeah, it makes this tea a lot more expensive. But the energy of it is incredible, and looking forward to drinking this tea hopefully this year. All right, so we're here March 24th. This is Da'a's home processing tea unit, so let's go check it out. There's not a whole lot of tea being harvested right now. It's still the early spring, but we'll check out some leaves, see what they're doing. So I love the light right now on these withering tea leaves. Oh, actually this looks so good. So we've got Gu Shu Cha here, and then we have Dan Zhu Cha, so of course ancient tree tea. This is single tree tea, so the older, older tree material is here, and I'll actually show you. Let's find a good example. Okay, so here we have single tree tea, and we have Gu Shu, which this is still a very large stem, but you can tell that this is thicker. And one thing you can look for when you brew the tea leaves out, just in any sheng pu'er in general, is that if the stems are very brittle, you're probably not looking at ancient tree material. If they're very supple, pliable, and thick and ropey like these are, that is good ancient tree material. And yeah, you can almost kind of age it, because this came from a four to five hundred year old tree. These came from a hundred year old trees. So yeah, these tea leaves are withering. Love the light here. Let's go over and check out Da'e. She is doing the wok. She's got a shaqing wok. So Da'e is stir-frying these leaves. She's almost done, so she's got her helpers ready with this bamboo mat. They're about to come off the wok. And then after that, we will roll them. And we just rolled these out. So we just stood here rolling these tea leaves all by hand. After this sits for many hours, it'll go upstairs and there's a sort of a passive solar system or a greenhouse. And if it's direct sun, it'll just go straight out into the sun. If it's a little bit cloudier, it'll just be under that so that they dry out in due time. And yeah, in a couple of days, we'll have some ancient tree tea. Okay, so after tea harvest, the tea leaves are going to be withering for a few hours. That step just reduces the moisture content, mainly for this step. So that step is very necessary because if he was to throw on these leaves fresh off of the tree, they would almost like boil. You would have a bunch of black spots on the tea leaves. So with an adequate amount of moisture evaporated from the tea leaves, he's now throwing it onto this wok, which is about 300 degrees Celsius. And what that is going to do, of course, is deactivate some of the enzymes responsible for oxidation. And that's the key is that it's partial because with sheng pu'er, what this is going to be is that it's crucial that some of those enzymes are kept alive so that it will slowly age with right storage conditions. So the technique and the procedures right here are vastly important, probably the most important step, arguably. And so Mumu here is really great at this. And so he's turning the leaves really, really quickly right now. You can hear that snap, crackle, and pop, and he's wanting to not let those leaves get too hot. And so the water is not just sitting in the leaves too much. So he's turning it, he's turning it, and eventually that steam will cook the leaves as well. And we'll check back in at the later stage of this. All right, so Da and Mumu actually had to go away some tea leaves that just came in from the tea picker. So they handed me the gloves, knowing that I had done this last year. So here I am one year later doing sha qing again. So I'll just run over the basic technique that I've come to understand it. And again, I'm very much new to this, but you don't hug in the iron here. You really don't want to burn yourself that way. So you kind of keep your hands about an inch above it and then just kind of turn like that. Bring it down, turn. Go in, bring it down, turn. And we're about halfway through this process. So it can kind of hang out a little bit. It's not as much of a priority to flip them so expediently like it is in the beginning. And we'll also want to just shake it out because any of these tea leaves, they get clumped up like this. They won't expose all the surface area on the leaves to the wok. So after shaking them up, just kind of commence doing that same turning motion again. And as this continues, we'll just gradually slow down. The hottest part is right here at the bottom. And we'll actually have someone actually re-up the wood to get it back up to temp to finish it out pretty soon. So you want a consistent 300, 250 to 300 throughout it all. Definitely starting out pretty high. Some people like to settle it, finish it at a lower temp. But you also, you know, we don't need to be adverse to clumping it because it's really the steam also is kind of cooking it. So again, you know, I'm just kind of learning this, but that's my best understanding. So take it with a grain of salt. All done? All right. So we're jumping into step four of shengguan production. So of course, there's harvesting tea. There's withering the tea leaves. There is the wok frying. And then right now we have the rolling phase that Da is doing right here. And I love working with this family because their tea is pretty much small batch. Every single day they'll harvest more and more and more, and they'll do it all by hand. So you have these rolling machines typically that can do this, but they're keeping it old school and rolling it by hand. It's very difficult actually, besides just the backbreaking labor of just continuing to do that. You actually, there's this technique that last year I was doing this and you have to roll this mass and not let the mass get away from you. And then she'll shake it up again to get that moisture out. And then she'll roll it again and roll it again. And at the very end, she's got these separate clumps that she'll do this with. And it's very difficult to do this with your wrists as well as your back. All right, so we're here in Nenwu Shan and this is another un-chaperoned moment where Da has just left me to do this one task while she hangs out with the tea pickers. And so yeah, we're spreading out these tea leaves to sun dry. So this is day two after we have harvested. We've done the kill green process. We've rolled it and we've piled it overnight. And now we're here spreading it out. It's going to dry and the next day or so we'll be able to drink this tea. But I wanted to show you in the piling process, which I think is really, really cool. So after the kill green, after the rolling, overnight it's piled. And so any enzymes left in the tea leaves, some of which will oxidize. So you'll see that the thinner cell walls of the tea leaves will have completely been deactivated, denatured. The enzymes are denatured. So it's almost like green tea. So it's a very fresh green pop. Whereas these thicker cell walls, especially in these ancient tree teas, they'll have some enzymes that are left to oxidize. So overnight these stems, which were sort of green last night, turn yellow orange, which I love this because there's going to lend a sweetness to that, which you get with red teas a little bit as well as that, that green, yummy, fragrant pop here all at the same time. So really complex, all handmade tea here, ready to dry. Just 50 yards or so from Da'o and Mumu's house is an old decommissioned tea factory from the state-owned factory days. We'd walk by it about every day and peer into the windows at the old machinery. This was Nemo Mountain's first actual tea factory and Mumu's grandfather, Yang Kaidan, managed it for 40 years from the 1950s to the 90s, right before it was closed down. After asking a few questions at the right time, I learned that the aging three-story mansion I was staying in had been built by Mumu's grandfather. The family I'd grown so close to was once a thriving tea lineage, I realized. But in less than a generation, it had nearly unraveled under the weight of one man's unrepentant alcoholism. For these years, the only thread keeping this micro dynasty alive was a determined mother, working tirelessly until her sons were old enough to have a shot at turning things around. All right, we're in Nunnall Mountain still. This is Bompo Village. Love this steep slope, this well-draining ecology with ancient, ancient trees here. Here we see Camellia sinensis, Assamica, the big leaf variety here in its natural ecology. Its niche right here is understory shrub. And with all of that canopy shade, these trees at this high elevation in its native habitat grows to hundreds, hundreds of years old. I mean, this specimen likely over 300, if not 400, 500 years old. You can see this diversity where there's this epiphytic plant growth here. The people don't dare apply pesticides because when you're this old, you've withstood basically anything that nature can throw at you. So it's naturally, absolutely organic. Hundreds of years ago, the ancestors of the folks that we're hanging out with planted these trees by saving seeds from bushes that they enjoyed, that they thought were suitable, and they planted these. And so these are all seed propagated. This is not a formal cultivar. This isn't an asexual propagation, meaning there's not a mother bush where they just take cuttings from and just plant them over and over and over and over again. You don't actually get that ecological resilience with those cuttings with the single organism, or you don't get it with the entire ecology because every single one of these tea trees is slightly different than the other. And so only the strongest, the fittest survive, and you can get seeds from the next and from the next. And so, you know, being in relationship with Homo sapiens for all of these thousands of years has really lent this resiliency and this longevity to these tea plants. All right, so tea friends, back in 2023, you might remember that we did a Bampo select tree production. So Da'a's uncle owns trees here in Bampo Laosai, and they took 80, 70 to 80 specific larger trees and just made one production out of that. And I think this is a really interesting grade, because you have what we historically call Gu Shu, which is ancient tree, but really that just means an ecology at this point in the market, in my experience, in that it just means ancient tree ecology. And there might be trees transplanted of all ages, but doing a select tree production, I think, is one way to get ancient tree for sure. That or single tree production or tall pole tree production, but having 80 of the largest specimens in Bampo, I can't wait. It makes a really great tea. Grateful. So we're in the third story of Da'a's house. This is Shukun Laosai village, old stone village behind us, and her home in stone village hosts down the hill some wonderful ancient tree gardens that we're going to drink some tea from. So in front of us, what's today? I think it's 4-2, it's April 2nd. And so we got here, we've been here a little over a week, and the beginning of spring ancient tree harvests began with this date on the 24th, and some days later there has been another harvest. And matter of fact, every day has a little bit of a harvest, but we just wanted to get a widespread here to taste kind of the difference, a little snapshot of each of these dates. So 3-24, 3-28, and yesterday. So we just pulled this right off the drying racks. There might be a little bit of turbidity within the tea soup because it hasn't fully fully dried, but I wanted to just taste this tea because we have the privilege of selecting certain days, certain windows of time, and so I figure why not. And I think, well, let's just talk about the weather in Yunnan this, in southern Yunnan this spring. So we've had a really early, amazingly, rain that happened, I believe, probably 3-18, something like that, a little bit before the spring equinox. So that is really unusual in the last several few years where there's just been this historic drought, and the tea gardens just take a long, long time to gather up that sprout and just come to fruition. So we had early flushes this year, and then we've had really unseasonably cool weather. Usually it's just hot, hot and dry. We had that nice early rain, and we've had cool weather. It's almost been like 60, 50, 60 degrees Fahrenheit during these nights. We've had to have long sleeves. It's very unusual for our visits to southern Yunnan. So that has made for, I think, probably some very interesting tea. Absolutely different than last year's, which was incredibly hot and dry. So let's just jump into it. So 324, I'm going to weigh this out. Let's put 6-7 grams in each of these. Okay, we don't need to be super, super accurate, but we will now brew these teas up. So let's go to quick rinse first. Smell the guy one way. Wow. It's like a creamy, milky, but tenaciously green. There's this sort of clovey thing going on with her gardens. I absolutely love these gardens. Looking at the tea soup, just a little bit of turbidity there. That'll probably clear up in the next few weeks. Super, super new tea still. Boom. Number two, 328. Melting them down. Getting all the little spider legs in. Yep. Trying to not burn myself. All right. Beauty. A little bit more gold already with this one. I wonder if someone was on the walk who was different than this person, because they might have done a little bit of a longer kill green process than this one, as this one is oxidized just a little bit more. But I'm okay with that kind of homemade, handmade variance. I think that's the beautiful thing of non-mechanized, non-industrial tea. All right. Now for the last one, this just off the drying rack outside, upstairs, bring this one up. Not sure how this was going to look compared. Yes, yes, yes, yes. All right. So I'm actually going to smell back to back to back. Oh, wow. Yeah. Greener. What was really interesting actually was this bag was the least full. So it was like not a whole lot was harvested, just over a kilo, I believe. And she was saying that two to three, sometimes four kilos per day at this early in the springtime is on average being harvested. And this one was by far the smallest bag. And so that's interesting that the tea soup looks different. The smell is just greener, fresher, a little bit more full. There's something there that's different. Absolutely. So that's an interesting correlation. I'm not sure if that's a causation. Okay. That's hamier. That is meaty. It's got the egg custard milky sort of thing like that, but there is sort of this milkiness. This has got that tenacious vegetable green going that I love about her garden. So these are all really interesting, colorful variations and iterations of the tea that I'm very familiar with from her. This is really interesting. Never done this before, honestly. So, yeah, let's try these. So I'm going to dump out this rinse. So let's have a sip. Super green as always. I mean, this is just less than two weeks old. It's got that tenacity, that like stone village, just green, like punchy thing that I love so much. But it has that character, but it also has that pillow that it lands in with those ancient trees. It has that minerality. It has that salivation that's there. I'd say a little bit milkier, a little bit more green, a little bit milkier on this one. And again, I mean, I didn't think I was going to line these up and have a huge difference between these, but I just wanted to just check it out. So again, not a huge difference. Let's check out the third one. All right, this third one, I feel like the processing is a little bit different. There's a little bit more oxidation on it. You can tell this sort of champagne color, less green, perhaps gold, green, more champagne. That's very interesting, right? And again, I like that there's variation with the processing. We took a trip to Iwu and took Mumu, her son, with us. And so he wasn't here for this dash. And so he wasn't part of the processing team. So it was Da'a and her boyfriend, I think, primarily doing that. So that's very interesting. Let's hit this one more time. All right, so we're back. We've got like six, seven, eight seeds maybe in. And yeah, what's the verdict? So really interesting observations, honestly. And I feel like it kind of aligns with kind of my preconceptions going into this just a little bit, where I don't necessarily think the earliest spring harvest is the best. I feel like if you're in an ancient tree garden, it needs a little bit of time to just do its thing, to take that big gulp from the environment and to sprout out. So I think maybe the younger of the ancient trees in this garden sprouted first, perhaps. There's a little bit less minerality in this one. The mouthfeel isn't quite as thick. The hui gan isn't quite as there. I mean, again, these are really minute differences. This is still, categorically, such a really great tea. I really love this tea. So these are just slight variations. What was really interesting is as we made it to this one, I feel like it kind of bottomed out a little bit. Not quite sure what to make of that. Maybe there was this kind of, the sprightly trees really just took that quick gulp, hit it, and that's the energy that we're really connecting with with this one. But this one wasn't the oldest trees of the garden and not the most reactionary trees of the garden that this one was. And so there's this sort of like drop out here. What was interesting was this started out to be the most green and clear. These are the first steeps. And then it got the most golden in the late steeps. I'm really not totally sure what to make of that, but fascinating nonetheless. I think the winner is 4-1, so April 1st, April Fool's Day. This one, it just has this meatiness. I feel like that's really when some of the older specimens in the garden started to really pick up the water from that early rain about a week before, a week or two before, and finally started to sprout out. So I found that to be really interesting and it kind of meets, again, those preconceptions that I had where it's like, wait a little bit, wait a little bit, even though it's like spring equinox, you know, some of the first ancient tree gardens start to sprout in these gardens. Wait a little bit and the threshold of getting into April and mid-April sometimes I think produces some of the best tea. And again, this is all elevation dependent. This is all ecology dependent. There's so many other variables and factors here that go into stuff like this. So what this means is that we're likely going to order tea more in this window, say like April and moving forward, likely. And again, two to three, maybe even four kilos are produced a day with this family for these gardens. At this point, it'll probably ramp up a little bit. And since we're ordering say almost 20, maybe a little bit over 20 kilos this year, this will be not sufficient enough. And so we'll probably get a little bit more on this as we move forward from April 1st. But yeah, thanks for joining. This was awesome. On this last day with Da'a and her family, it also happened to finally be time to harvest the tea leaves from the reinherited 700 year old tea tree. This was an historic moment. The first harvest since they had been reunited with this priceless heirloom of the family line. They'd even lined up a Hong Kong investor that had prepaid to secure the tea that was to be produced from this micro harvest. That evening, Mumu started wok frying and rolling the eight and a half kilos of fresh leaves all by himself, finally finishing just past midnight. In an unexpected moment, he grabbed a handful of the processed tea and invited us upstairs to have a session of it with him. Awestruck, we watched our cups be filled with a vibrant soup that elicited a deep, rich flavor with an electric texture, irrepressible over a seemingly endless amount of steeps. It was hopeless to even think about getting sleep that night, but it didn't matter. In my mind, I had not only witnessed the comeback of this family, but the crowning of a new tea king of Nenwu Mountain.