Yinji is a well-established tea brand and factory on the edge of Mengku town. It is a Lahu family business founded in 1995 and handed over to the second generation, Li Shiyuan and A Jian in 2020. A Jian is a cigar enjoyer who’s been processing since he was a teen, while Li Shiyuan enjoys photography and runs a cafe with coffee sourced from around Mengku. 

Yinji has been focusing on high-end puerh tea since the year 2000 and the aim of this new generation is to keep the bar as high. As Li Shiyuan said, “I only want to make tea purely from old-growth trees in the best core producing areas”. Yinji specializes in Mengku-area puerh and they own a number of plots in the region: ~100 mu principally in Nuowu, Xiaohusai, and Xiaohuangtian. Beyond what they own, they lease around ten times as much land and source from dozens of producers across Lincang and beyond.

While they whitelabel a significant amount of tea, their own brand is focused on older trees. In fact, they have streamlined their operations for the production of danzhu tea: every ancient tree has its own file (age, height, crown, trunk, coordinates, altitude, photographs, and so on) readable off a QR code, and they have a quite large and modern tea factory to enable many different batches to be processed in parallel. Ironically, they are rather low-tech when it comes to tea production: the plots are left to their own devices outside of harvest, while the leaves meticulously processed to age well.

How did they come to know Blue Hat? That’s a longer story involving a knocking on a single door obsessively even though there were many other around, but that’s for another time. What matters is, like Guniangzhai 42[link], their emphasis the good stuff: Li Shiyuan and A Jian have bet on quality and you can try the result for yourself.