Generally Chinese black tea has been wide-spread and adored in tea lovers’ community for many centuries, its by-word is “red tea”. A great amount of people guess that red tea has a nice value as a source of hopeful and valid health profits, so its fame grows only broader these days. Some sorts of Chinese tea may be encountered among today’s Vietnamese teas.

Foundations of Chinese Black Tea

This product arose from China and, so to say, was a part of Chinese eating habits.

Brewing tea looks like a brown with tinge of red or severely black beverage. Its one specific feature stems from, in accordance with some resources, the ability to soften with age and be become more saturated in taste. Especially classic black teas has diverse swagger first-rate aromas and flavors, which surely awoke the particular adjectives, describing different sorts of alcohol beverages.

(A compressed brick of pu-erh tea. Individual leaves can be seen on the surface of the brick. "Zhuan cha" by Jason Fasi - Wikipedia. Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons)

The simplest is storing Chinese black tea. It may be somehow entitled like this because of the storage conditions: it should be kept in appropriately aerated place, however, without any temperature restriction. In opposition to other types of teas, Chinese black teas are normally compressed and manufactured as pieces of various forms and sizes. Bamboo-like tubes is one of the exotic form of them, other usual are, for instance, square or round.

Chinese Black Teas’ Sorts

They are basically subdivided into three groups, settling upon diverse manufacturing methods:

1. Souchong Black Tea – it arises from the soil of Fujian province, near Wuyi Mountain City. Its pine-smoking perfume is a unique amongst other black teas throughout the whole world, that’s experts say. The manufacture areas are different so there’re four types of them:

- Tongmuguan Souchong is rooted from Tongmuguan counry

- Chong’An, Jianyang and Guangzhe are a native land of Lapsang Souchong.

- Xingcun town in Chong’An county is a land of XingChun Souchong

- One is not originated from Wuyi Mountain City, it’s Smoking Souchong

Lapsang Souchong is deemed as the best of those, which have a specific longan flavor. Quite opposite is the Smoking Souchong, which goes through an imitational method as the rest of Souchong black teas, it’s produced from low grade congou black tea. Burning shrub of pine-tree plant gives the desired mocking fragrance.

(Lapsang souchong - Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

2. Congou Black Tea – it progressed from the Souchong variety as a definite type of Chinese black teas. There some variants of it - Dianhong of Yunnan, Qihong of Anhui (Keemun black), Suhong of Jiangsu, Huhong of Hunan and Chuanhong of Sichuan have the most appreciable expansion.

(Rose Congou Superior China Black Tea, from http://www.jenierteas.com/rose-congou-superior-china-black-tea-p520)

3. Broken Black Tea – “graded black tea”, by this by-word, have such a nickname for the reason of international uniform grading standard. It divides teas by the diversities in shapes: broken leaf black, of small grain shape; the whole leaf black, of short strip shape; dust black, of powdered shape and fannings black, of small slice shape.

("Black tea grading" by Icetea8 at en.wikipedia. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

Original source of Chinese black tea is Chong’An, Fujian, that’s a really noticeable fact. Nowadays it’s a city of the Wuyi Mountain in fact. At the beginning, at the end of 18^th century, black tea was produced in the Wuyi Mountain. Hence, that’s how the congou black tea was brought to light. Afterwards, the black teas’ processing method came to Jiangsi province, and after – to Keemun.