Oolong

Anxi

Anxi county oolongs are lightly oxidized and heavily rolled into tight pellets that open slowly across many steeps. Tieguanyin is the defining style: at its best, it carries a clean orchid-floral fragrance with a slight creamy or buttery texture, but the quality range from fresh-green jade to deep-roasted traditional is wide and often unlabeled. Huang Jin Gui is lighter with a honey-flower character; Mao Xie is earthier and grassier. The contrast to Wuyi rock oolong is sharp: Anxi leans floral, light, and high-fragrance where Wuyi leans roasted, mineral, and deep.

teabert, the tealytics teapot, keeper of the kettle

Anxi is the floral, jade-green face of oolong, tight pellets that open into orchid and a buttery softness, but its Tieguanyin swings from green to deeply roasted, so check which one you have. The leaf is rolled so tightly that a gaiwan of it looks half empty before the first steep and is overflowing by the fourth.

Styles in this family

Tie Guan Yin (Iron Goddess)

The defining buying decision for Tie Guan Yin is which product you are actually getting: the modern qingxiang style (lightly oxidized, jade-green, intensely…

Huang Jin Gui

Huang Jin Gui (golden osmanthus) is one of the four famous Anxi cultivars, alongside Tieguanyin, Ben Shan and Mao Xie, and the earliest to bud each spring. It…

Ben Shan

Ben Shan (root mountain) is one of the four famous tea cultivars of Anxi in southern Fujian, alongside Tieguanyin, Mao Xie and Huang Jin Gui. It is jade-rolled…

Mao Xie (Hairy Crab)

Mao Xie (hairy crab) is one of the four famous Anxi cultivars, alongside Tieguanyin, Ben Shan and Huang Jin Gui, named for the fine downy hairs on its buds and…

How it's made

The steps overlap in practice; this is a reading order, not a set of separate stages.