Dark Tea

They can be really good if processed and stored properly.

what new information? Are we talking hei cha stored in baskets?

Anhui province produces dark tea? Maybe you mean anhua.

Anhui? As Teasenz ssaid,may be you mean Anhua? I have drunk Anhua Dark Tea which tastes sweet.And it’s said that the flavor of Anhua Dark Tea will be better if you store it well for a long time.

Unless I’m way off dark tea is just one possible translation for hei cha, one of the main categories of teas. Or it could be translated as black tea, but that’s a conflict with the British renaming “red” teas as black tea awhile back.

The difference isn’t easy to fully pin down but red / black tea is fully oxidized tea, processed in such a way to allow air contact with enzymes in the leaves to convert some of the compounds, and hei cha / dark tea is typically fermented instead (versus oxidized, which are at least the common terms for those two processes, even if there are other ways to describe them, some perhaps more technically accurate). Pu’er is sometimes grouped in with hei cha and sometimes not, depending on how people see the categories, and how they interpret sheng pu’er being fermented by aging versus some sort of wet-piling processing step. Shou pu’er should clearly be hei cha, it would seem to me, but given how people vary so much on terms and categories I wouldn’t expect that understanding to be completely universal.

I just reviewed a Liu Bao, one type of hei cha, the second version of that tea I’ve ever tried. It tasted a lot like someone’s basement, but from what I’ve heard it may be possible to “air out” the tea for a few months, or a year, and it may recover from that aspect range to some degree. The part about how aging changes hei cha gets complicated, varying for different types, relating to storage conditions, tying in with personal preferences about best characteristics, etc.