Mei Yang

Mei Yang began her path in the tea gardens of Wudong Shan in 2007, learning directly from fourth-generation dancong producers who still pluck by hand from ancient bushes. That immersion shaped her entire practice: a belief that a rare tea alert is only as valuable as the provenance behind it. Now a senior expert on tea.dog, Mei is the gatekeeper for collectors seeking authentic old-bush dancong, Mí Lán Xiāng (蜜兰香) single-origin lots, and small-batch black teas like Jīn Jūn Méi (金骏眉) from Tongmu. She leads the alert verification protocol laid out in her thread, “Phoenix old-bush dancong — alert protocol,” where she breaks down the markers of genuine senescence, soil composition, and the specific elevation bands that make Phoenix Mountain teas irreplicable. Every watchlist notification that passes through tea.dog under her watch carries a verification trail — from leaf morphology to the master’s personal drying notes. Beyond alert verification, Mei hosts expert sessions on tea.school, teaching collectors how to distinguish a true old-bush honey-orchid aroma from younger-vine approximations. She also co-designs community blend-tasting trials with tea.community, inviting members to blind-taste suspect lots and compare them against her authenticated reference samples. Her regional work extends to lapsang souchong and the black teas of Guangdong’s coastal microclimates, but her heart remains on Phoenix Mountain. In March 2025 she completed a three-month residency in Chaozhou documenting century-old Finest Grade bush lineages — material that now fuels both tea.dog’s alert library and the provenance descriptions at shop.thetea.app. For Mei, the difference between a watchlist hit and a genuine find is not data; it is the human chain of custody she has spent decades learning to trust.