"Honey Orchid" Mi Lan Xiang Dan Cong Oolong Tea

The Great Emperor of All under Heaven once asked the wise tea master Lao Cha: 

– Tell me, wise old man, is there a tea that could compare in its fragrance to a beautiful flower?

– Yes, there is, Your Highness. It's called Mi Lan Xiang Dan Cong Oolong, and it possesses an outstanding Orchid Aroma and the sweetness of honey. Drinking the tea is like sipping the sweet sap of Heaven.

Mi Lan Xiang Dan Cong Oolong tea, which translates as Honey Orchid Aroma, is one of the ten main fragrance types of the Dan Cong tea tree – famous for its ability to mimic different flavors. From the "Flower Aroma" series, our Mi Lan Xiang is one of the most acclaimed Dan Cong tea. It possesses the fragrance of irises and orchids and a honey-sweet taste. Dan Cong teas are a much-loved, Chaozhou-native type of oolong teas that grow on the Phoenix (Fenghuang) mountain in Guandong, China. While the core production area for an authentic Dan Cong is in and around Wudong village, today, this fragrant oolong can be found all around the Chaoshan area as an unaltered symbol of the prevailing local Gong Fu tea culture. Our Mi Lan Xiang Oolong is worthy of its name of an authentic "single bush" tea. It's full of "shan yun" (山韵) – "mountain rhyme", (similar to "yan yun" (岩韵) for Wuyi Rock Oolongs), used to describe the unique characteristics of Fenghuang Dan Cong Oolongs.

When brewing this oolong tea, we recommend using zisha teacups together with aroma cups to extract this remarkable tea's full taste and aroma. The boiling water will create a clear and transparent oily yellow to deep golden tea soup with prominent honey and orchid aroma, revealing a sweet and light floral flavor that will intensify with each brew. After your last sip, leave the cup empty and let it cool down before inhaling again for one final goodbye gift - the lingering "bottom of the cup aroma", or Gua Xiang, that will make you dream of the next encounter with this remarkable tea. 

In Chinese, "Dan Cong" means "single bush". A dancong oolong tea garden, if we may call it so, differs significantly from a typical tea garden. Most tea gardens of the world have uniform short bushes growing in straight rows and pretty much similar in shape. However, Dan Cong tea gardens are unique because they are semi-wild - usually, tea farmers leave the trees unpruned. They also do not use pesticides, fertilizers, or herbicides in the growing process. Otherwise, we would not get the sweet and rare tea we know and love. Most of the authentic, high-mountain dancongs from the core production area in and around Wudong are actually trees, growing the way nature intended, sometimes even reaching 16 ft in height! Indeed, no Dan Cong bush is the same. While this is true with all teas, it is especially so with Phoenix DanCong tea - no batch is quite like the other due to how "wild" these tea trees are.

Shao Bo's grandparents founded their family tea gardens in Tian Zhu Keng and Wudong villages in Feng Huang Mountain. Now, Shao Bo is the head of the family and is attending to the tea trees that his ancestors planted, making him a third-generation tea farmer.