Inside our family's Wuyishan workshop

The first thing you notice is the smell.

If you arrive in late April, when the spring harvest is being processed, the air inside our workshop is dense with the smell of fresh leaves wilting on bamboo trays — green at first, then almost grassy, then floral as the oxidation begins. By the time you walk through the roasting room a few days later, the smell has changed entirely. There's a deep, smoky-sweet warmth from the charcoal pits — not unpleasant smoke like burning wood, but something closer to the smell of a bakery, if the bakery were also a forge.

That smell is the same smell every spring, in every Wuyishan workshop, going back centuries. It's the smell of yancha being made.

This is where our family has worked for four generations.

The setting

The workshop sits in a village inside the Wuyishan production zone, in northern Fujian Province. From the back door, you can see the cliffs that give the tea its mineral character — vertical walls of red and grey sandstone that catch the morning light and hold the heat into the evening. The tea plots are scattered across the village; some are walking distance, some are a short ride into the protected interior.

There's no signage on the workshop. From the street, it looks like any other family building. Inside, depending on the season, you'll find either a quiet, mostly empty processing floor — winter and summer — or an absolute crush of activity: bamboo trays everywhere, leaves spread out at every stage of withering and drying, the soft hiss of the kill-green pans, and somewhere in the back, the steady glow of charcoal under a row of roasting baskets.

The team

Our family does most of the work ourselves. During harvest, we bring in extra hands — neighbors and seasonal pickers who come back year after year — but the processing decisions are made by the family. There is no general manager. No tea master is sitting in an office. There is just us, in the room with the leaves, deciding.

Sister Qin oversees the workshop now. She decides when leaves are ready to come off the wilting trays, how many rounds of charcoal roasting each batch will get, and when to pull a vintage from the aging library for re-roasting. These decisions are not in a manual. Their judgments were developed over years of watching, smelling, and tasting.

Yanni - the daughter handles the U.S. operation — the brand, the store, the relationships with American customers. Our family in Wuyishan ships to Yanni in batches; Yanni packs and ships to you.

In Yunnan, separately, Denis is building our future Puer and Dianhong line. That's a longer story for another post.

A year in the workshop

The work we do is seasonal, but never finished.

Late winter (February–March). The bushes wake up. We watch the weather closely. A late frost can ruin a year's harvest. We prune, we walk the plots, we re-roast a few batches from the previous year's library to deepen them.

Spring harvest (April–May). This is the big one. Most of the year's flagship rock teas — Da Hong Pao, Rougui, Shuixian — come from the spring flush. We pick by hand, taking the new shoot plus three or four leaves. The leaves are spread on bamboo trays and left to wilt outdoors in the sun, then moved indoors as they soften. This step is critical and weather-dependent — humid days require longer wilting; dry days, shorter.

After wilting, the leaves are bruised in shallow bamboo drums, which initiates oxidation. The bruising is gentle — Wuyi oolongs are oxidized to roughly 30–60%, much less than black tea but more than green. The leaves are then panned in hot iron woks (kill-green) to stop the oxidation, rolled to break the cell walls, and dried.

This is when the tea becomes recognizable as oolong. But it isn't done.

Summer (June–August). The first round of charcoal roasting happens. The leaves are placed in shallow bamboo baskets above pits of glowing pinewood charcoal — no flame, just radiant heat — for several hours at a time. Charcoal roasting is what gives Wuyi rock tea its body, its sweetness, and its long aftertaste. It's also the step that's slowest to learn. A roast that's too hot will scorch the leaves and destroy the floral notes. A roast that's too cool will leave the tea grassy and unfinished. You judge by smell, by the color of the leaf as you turn it, by the feel of the basket in your hand.

Most rock teas get two or three roasts, weeks apart, with rest periods between. The deepest roasts can be ten or twelve rounds spread across a year.

Autumn (September–October). A small autumn harvest of certain cultivars. Most of our autumn work, though, is on the previous spring's batches — final roasting, sorting, and packing for sale.

Winter (November–January). This is when we work on the library. Aged teas need to be opened, inspected, and lightly re-roasted every few years to keep them from going stale. The 2009 Aged Narcissus we're currently selling has been through this cycle a dozen times. Each re-roast deepens the body and softens the polyphenols slightly. A well-kept aged Wuyi tea improves for decades.

The library

In a small back room of the workshop, we keep our aged tea library — clay jars and porcelain vessels stacked on wooden shelves, labeled by year and cultivar. Some of the oldest pieces are from the 1990s.

The library exists because our family has always held back a portion of the best lots from each year. Originally, it wasn't for sale — it was for ourselves, for special occasions, for guests. As the U.S. market for serious tea has grown, we've started releasing small amounts from the library when we have something worth sharing.

When we release a vintage, the listing shows the actual remaining grams. When it's gone, it's gone. There is no restock.

What you taste

Everything above — the wilting timing, the kill-green temperature, the rolling pressure, the number of charcoal roasts, the aging cycles — translates directly into what's in your cup. A Rougui from a workshop that rushes the roasts will be sharp and grassy. A Rougui from a workshop that takes its time will be deep, sweet, faintly cinnamon-spiced, and will keep talking long after you've swallowed.

The reason we run our own workshop instead of buying finished tea from regional processors is simple: we want every step in the chain. If something is off, we know where it happened because we did it.

Visit, if you're in the area

If you're ever traveling through Fujian — Xiamen, Fuzhou, or up through the mountains — write to us at hello@gravitea.co. We're happy to host visiting tea drinkers at the workshop. Sister Qin will pour for you.

— Jinrui Teahouse