2026 Bikou Longnan Longjing — Gansu Green Tea

The same rare corner of the map as our Bikou Maofeng, this time pressed flat in the Longjing style instead of rolled — from Bikou, Wen County, in Gansu, right at the northern edge of where tea grows in China at all. The gardens sit at 600-1560m along the Baishui River, in an area that also happens to be giant panda habitat, which says something about how undisturbed the growing conditions are.

Picked "pre-rain" (yu qian) — the classic marker for an early spring harvest, before the seasonal rains push the plant into faster, coarser growth — and pan-fired flat, the same processing family as Longjing, with the same gentle bean-like aroma over grassy freshness rather than a sharper vegetal edge. Like our Maofeng from the same region, this is also a tea with a real economic story behind it: tea gardens here support thousands of farming households across formerly low-income villages in Wen County.