Mei Yang

Mei Yang grew up in the foothills of Fènghuáng Shān (凤凰山) in eastern Guangdong, the mountain whose cultivar map she now teaches from memory. Her work for the constellation centres on Dāncōng (单丛) — single-bush Phoenix oolongs — and on the cluster of Fujian and Guangdong black teas that share kin with them, particularly Zhèng Shān Xiǎo Zhǒng (正山小种, lapsang) and Jīn Jùn Méi (金骏眉).

On tea.events she runs two strands. The first is the Phoenix dancong pop-up — London this season, with stops planned for Berlin and Lisbon in 2026 — where she pours three to five vintages of Mì Lán Xiāng (蜜兰香) side by side and walks eight to twelve drinkers through what twelve years of storage does to a honey-orchid aroma. The second is the oolong programme at the Saint Petersburg tea festival 2026 — autumn, a four-day curation covering Wuyi yáncha, Anxi tiěguānyīn, and the full Phoenix aromatic spectrum from Yā Shǐ Xiāng (鸭屎香) to Xìng Rén Xiāng (杏仁香).

Mei trained for six years under a Wūdòng village master whose family has held plots above 1,200 metres since the late Qing. She still buys her teaching leaf directly from that cooperative each April and October, which is why her sessions tend to include weights and altitudes rather than marketing language — 4.8 grams, 95°C, leaves from a 1976 lǎo cōng bush, that kind of specificity. She co-writes tasting notes for puerh.app's oolong cross-reference index (the Phoenix cultivars share processing kinship with some Yunnan sun-dried experiments) and contributes the dancong chapter to the tea.school module on aromatic oolongs.

Her events on this platform tend to be small. Twelve seats is her usual cap; she has refused to scale past sixteen because the third and fourth infusions of a serious dancong need quiet, and quiet does not survive a room of thirty. Drinkers who have sat through one of her London sessions usually return for the festival in Saint Petersburg — the autumn programme is the longer-form version of what the pop-ups sketch.

When she is not pouring she is buying. Twice a year she travels the ridge from Wūdòng down through Shītóu Jiǎo and Dà'ān, tasting at farm gates and shipping the season's selections to the Teamotea warehouse that supplies shop.thetea.app. Her notes from those trips occasionally surface on tea.travel as field reports — read those before you book a Phoenix tour of your own.