A small stand above Huiyuan Valley
This lot comes from a small grower Amgalan has worked with through the Russian–Mongolian trade-route network for the better part of a decade. The bushes sit on a terraced shoulder above Huiyuan Valley in the northern Wuyi protected zone — around sixty-two hundred metres of elevation, where the morning fog burns off late and the rock face below the plot holds heat into the evening.
The trees here are roughly fifty to seventy years old. Not the centuries-old lǎo cōng of legend, but old enough that the trunks have gone mossy and the leaves carry the woody character serious yancha drinkers chase. The grower harvests once, in early May, picking only the third and fourth leaf for proper yancha structure.
Processing follows the traditional Wuyi sequence — withering on bamboo, hand-rocking through the night to bruise the leaf edges, charcoal-fired in two passes with a three-week rest between roasts. Amgalan personally cupped this lot in August 2026 against three other Shui Xian micro-lots before selecting it.
His note from that session, paraphrased: the roast is medium-heavy but already integrated; the cōng wèi (old-bush character) is present without being theatrical; the throat-feel is the part worth sending out. He recommends drinking it through autumn 2026 and into 2027, though it will likely continue to settle for another year in a sealed tin.
We send a 5g sample so you can run it through a full gongfu session — eight to ten steeps if you pace it.