Hong Yu
A cross of Burmese large-leaf assamica with wild Taiwanese mountain tea, and the reason Taiwanese black tea became distinctive rather than derivative. It produces a natural menthol and cinnamon aroma found in no other cultivar.
Where it sits in the botany
Hong Yu is recorded under Hybrid, the variety group one level above cultivar. It is associated with Taiwan, which is where it was selected or is most widely planted rather than the only place it grows.
Registration code: TRES No. 18. A breeding or registration code identifies the selection in an institutional register and is often the name a grower uses when the trade name is not.
Also transliterated as: hong yu, hongyu.
Where it came from
Bred at the Taiwan Tea Research and Extension Station and conventionally dated to a release in 1999.
How firm this is: Inferred rather than taken from a primary breeding or registration record. The date is consistently repeated in Taiwanese tea literature and was not verified against a primary registration record.
What the plant is like
The mint-and-cinnamon note is genetic, not flavouring, and it is the single most common thing new drinkers assume must be added.
Why a grower plants it
Yield, hardiness, when it buds, what it resists and whether a machine can cut it. This is the half of a cultivar’s identity that decides what is actually in the ground, and it is usually left out of writing aimed at drinkers.
A deliberate cross over the variety boundary, and the agronomy follows the assamica side: vigorous, large-leaved, high-yielding, heat- and humidity-tolerant, and comfortable at the low elevations around Sun Moon Lake in Nantou where it is concentrated. That matters commercially, because it gave growers on ground unsuitable for high-mountain oolong a product they could sell at a speciality price instead of competing on volume. The wild Taiwanese mountain tea parentage is what supplies the aroma; the Burmese assamica parentage is what makes it worth planting.
What it does in the cup
A clear menthol-and-cinnamon aroma over a smooth, full, low-astringency black-tea body with a sweet finish. The cooling top note is unmistakable and survives milk, which very few aromatic black teas manage.
How much of this is really the cultivar?
Hong Yu is the strongest single-cultivar attribution in this catalogue and one of the few where overstating it is difficult. The menthol-cinnamon aroma appears reliably across producers, elevations and years, it is not reproduced by any processing choice, and it is genetic rather than added — the last point worth stating plainly because new drinkers routinely assume it is a flavouring. Processing still decides the rest of the cup, and a clumsily oxidised Hong Yu is a poor tea with a distinctive nose. But if a reader wants one example of a cultivar genuinely carrying an identity, this is the one to reach for, and the fact that it took a deliberate wide cross to produce it says something about how rarely that happens.
Cultivar, growing site and processing all shape a cup, and the cultivar is very often the smallest of the three. It is also the one that fits on a label, so almost every commercial incentive runs toward overstating it. This section is on every cultivar page that has been reviewed for it, including the ones where the honest answer is “less than you would think”.
What it is usually made into
The categories this cultivar is typically processed into. It is a statement about common practice, not a limit — processing decides the category, and a cultivar can be taken down more than one route.
- Black tea — Tea taken deliberately through full enzymatic oxidation, giving the dark leaf, amber-to-red liquor and malty or brisk character most Western drinkers think of as simply 'tea'.
Teas in the catalogue made from Hong Yu
Other cultivars in Hybrid
Guides covering this cultivar
- The other camellias: tea’s relatives, and the ones sold as tea — Camellia is a large genus and tea is one species in it. Several of the others are useful, one is a major oilseed crop, some are grown in gardens, and a few are harvested and sold in ways that make them hard to tell apart from tea.
- Reading a cultivar code: TV1, TRI 2043, TRFK 31/8, Taicha No. 18 — Half the world’s tea plants are known by codes rather than names, and the codes are not arbitrary. Each one records which institution made the selection and, often, where in its programme the plant sits.
- Cultivars bred for smell — Most tea cultivars were selected for yield, hardiness and budding date. A small and growing group was selected for aroma, and the teas made from them are the clearest evidence available that a plant contributes something processing cannot supply.
Sources
- TeaHQ editorial synthesis — TeaHQ
This page is TeaHQ’s own synthesis throughout. No breeding register or institutional record stands behind the account above, which is why the origin note carries its confidence in the open rather than reading as a citation.
Written comparisons
Where TeaHQ has set this cultivar against something it is routinely confused with, and argued the differences out in full.
- Benifuuki vs Hong Yu (Ruby 18) — Two cultivars bred for black tea in countries that make almost none, and they show two different strategies for it. Japan crossed towards assamica and got astringency and aroma; Taiwan crossed Burmese assamica with wild mountain tea and got a signature nobody expected.
- Hong Yu (Ruby 18) vs Hong Yun (Ruby 21) — Taiwanese black tea became distinctive rather than derivative because of one cross, and that cross produces a natural menthol-and-cinnamon aroma nobody believes is natural. Its less famous sibling is the answer for anyone who does not want it.
- Tai Cha No. 8 vs Hong Yu (No. 18) — The two black-tea cultivars of Sun Moon Lake, and the reason Taiwanese black tea comes in two quite different forms. One is straightforward large-leaf assamica; the other is a hybrid whose mint-and-cinnamon note is genetic and is constantly mistaken for flavouring.