Ancha

Ancha — literally peace tea — is a traditional dark tea from Qimen county in Anhui, the same green-tea country that gave the world Keemun red; indeed Ancha is reckoned a forerunner of it. Its method is unlike any other. After processing the leaf is aged out in the night dew — “without the night dew, no good Ancha,” the saying runs — then packed into baskets lined with the broad ruò bamboo leaf, whose scent it takes on. The whole making can stretch eight months.

The result is a singular cup. Young Ancha is clean and orange-bright, with the zòngyè note of bamboo-wrapped rice dumplings; with three to five years it turns honeyed and plummy; older still, it shows the medicinal, camphor-balsam notes of true age. Its calling card is a warm betel-nut fragrance, bīnláng xiāng. Long exported to Southeast Asia and taken there as a folk medicine, it earned the name “holy tea”; nearly lost in the twentieth century, it has been revived in recent decades.

In the cup

Rinse it first, then brew boiling and short for many steeps. The taste is dense and clean, with a soft, returning sweetness; with age it grows a sticky, sugary roundness, tián nuò. Drink it after a rich meal, or on a damp day, as the south of China long has.