Purple buds and the Ya Bao family
Why some buds are purple, some silver, and some turn red, and how to tell them apart in the cup.
Two ways the cup gets its colour
A "purple" tea and a "red" tea can look almost the same dry. The difference is where the colour comes from. Everything below is one of these two.
A purple pigment the plant makes as sunscreen against UV at altitude. It is in the bud before anyone processes it. The liquor stays pale to gold.
Enzymatic browning during processing, the same reaction behind red tea. The colour comes from how the leaf is made, not from pigment. The liquor turns amber to red.
Purple in the leaf
natural pigment · Yunnan
Naturally purple buds on old, wild trees. Only a few purple shoots per tree, so it is scarce. Made as sheng puer, or sun-dried white.
One purple mutant found in 1985, now a cloned cultivar. Uniform deep purple, high anthocyanin, noticeably bitter. Made green, white or red.
The Ya Bao family
芽苞 · bud casings from wild trees, picked once a year · naturally low in caffeine
Silver is the bud's own pale colour, just sun-dried. Red is a wild Dali bud, oxidised, so its colour is the making, not pigment. The purple buds, the Zi Ya above, are the ones coloured by pigment.
Tell them apart at a glance
Purple in the leaf is pigment; red in the cup is usually oxidation. Market names mix the two, so the cup is the surest tell.
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