Keemun

Malt, baked sweet potato, and cocoa, with enough body for milk. It is the round everyday black tea in the Discovery Kit.

Sweet and smooth rather than tannic. It takes dairy without turning thin.

Keemun is Qimen in an older English spelling. The tea comes from Qimen County in Huangshan, Anhui. Until the late nineteenth century those hills were mostly green tea. Around 1875, local makers—often tied to Yu Ganchen (余干臣)—began fully oxidizing the small-leaf bushes and selling a fragrant black tea. It became one of China’s three famous black teas, and the name traveled with the export trade.

Qimen is a geographic-indication region for the style. The cup people expect is floral, cocoa-like, and round rather than the tannic snap of a breakfast blend—which is why it belongs in a milk-tea lineup as a tea with a name, not a generic “Chinese black.”

Keemun is a gongfu black tea: wither, roll, fully oxidize, then dry. The bushes are small-leaf Camellia sinensis var. sinensis. That is the craft difference from a Yunnan large-leaf black tea, even when both end up next to milk.

A milk-tea Keemun is chosen for body and a sweet, cocoa-malt middle that still reads after ice. It does not need to taste like a tasting-room Qimen to do that job; it needs to taste like tea after milk.