A private gongfu tea session with senior expert Mei Yang — online from your own kitchen, or in person where arranged — is an unhurried session in Chinese oolong and black tea, built on a decade of returning to Phoenix Mountain for the winter charcoal roast.
in session with Mei Yang
A sommelier session runs through tea.services, the constellation’s booking layer for private sessions with its resident experts. Mei Yang leads this one, drawing on the specialty she has built since 2014, when she first apprenticed under charcoal-roaster Chen Yousheng in Wudong village on Phoenix Mountain — she has returned every winter since for the roasting season, and that annual return is still the backbone of how she teaches dancong.
For an online session, the format is simple and deliberately unrushed: two teas arrive by post ahead of time, sealed in light-proof caddies, along with a brewing guide. On the call, Mei Yang walks through the gōngfū chá (工夫茶) sequence in real time — warming the vessel, rinsing the leaf, the short first steep — narrating what she’s doing and why rather than delivering a script. A typical pairing sets a honey-orchid Mí Lán Xiāng (蜜兰香) dancong from Phoenix Mountain against an unsmoked Jīn Jùn Méi (金骏眉) from the Wuyi core area, sourced from a producer family she has worked with directly — the kind of side-by-side that makes the difference between oolong and black tea processing legible in a way description alone cannot.
The session structure adjusts to the tea: dancong is brewed short and repeatedly, each steep a matter of seconds to catch the aromatic lift before astringency arrives; black tea takes a fuller boil and a slightly longer first pour. Mei Yang’s own notes distinguish the aroma families within dancong — Mì Lán Xiāng’s honey-fruit register against Yā Shǐ Xiāng’s startling floral lift (the name translates bluntly, but the tea does not taste like its name) — and she can speak to both from direct sourcing relationships rather than secondhand description.
what the session covers
Every session is built around two teas chosen in a short pre-call conversation, tuned to the guest’s palate and curiosity — a spring-harvest dancong against a smoked Zhèng Shān Xiǎo Zhǒng (正山小种) lapsang for one guest, an aged rock oolong against a golden-tipped black tea for another. Mei Yang’s own sourcing runs through a Tongmu village workshop for lapsang and the Jiang family’s Wuyi-core plots for Jin Jun Mei, so the teas poured in a session are the same lots she selects for her own ongoing work, not a generic sampler.
Guests leave with a written record of what was tasted, the brewing parameters used, and where the same teas can be reordered — either through the constellation’s shops or directly, depending on the lot. For anyone who wants to keep studying afterward, Mei Yang’s longer tasting notes and sourcing dispatches are published on puerh.app, and her structured oolong curriculum runs as a module on tea.school.