Verdant Tea | Small Family Tea Farmers

Verdant Tea is dedicated to
the story of the growers,
our partners.

We are all about representation, bringing teas never before seen outside China to the world with a unique direct trade model based on personal relationships.

SPOTLIGHT:
our oldest partners -
the He Family in Laoshan Village

Mr. He in Laoshan Village remembers when his father struggled to even grow enough food on their land to feed the family. Now Mr. He’s work in tea has raised up the whole village, and helped to establish a shared workshop space for tea finishing.

By partnering with Verdant, Mr. He is able to take risks on new growing techniques like Laoshan oolong that are bringing national attention to the new growing region. Today, his now internationally famous tea provides a living for his entire family and the cooperative that has grown up around it, and inspired local regulations to declare Laoshan an environmentally protected growing region.

Mr. He in his tea fields

He Qingqing and her mother in the workshop

Mr. He works while his granddaughter watches

What makes good tea?

Ms. Li and her mother climb their trees to pick in Qianjiazhai

Good People

The best tea in the world takes the skill and care of people committed to what they do, people who own their land and control their entire process without being hidden or controlled by a brand.

Craft starts in the fields.

Our partner farmers work over generations to care for their land, encourage biodiversity, plant the right tea for their climate, use clean organic and sustainable techniques, and pick every bud and leaf entirely by hand.

Native plants grow alongside tea in the Zhang Family's fields

Craft continues in the workshop.

Tea requires skills that take generations of accumulated knowledge to perfect. Our partners craft every batch by hand and adjust their technique to match the harvest and the weather. Some of their teas take over 40 hours of straight finishing work to bring from fresh leaf to finished tea, and months or years more for some aged teas.

Shui Huamin finishes Dragonwell green tea

All this so that - no matter how you brew - your tea tastes perfect.

Brewing great tea takes no fuss. Our partner farmers got all the hard work out of the way.

Try our simple tea challenge:

Take the leaves, put them in your favorite mug or tempered glass, add hot water and enjoy. No timers, no thermometers, no scales, no worries. Even brewed this simply, these teas should be unlike anything you’ve tasted before.

That’s because they are the true work of real small farmers - our partners and co-founders - not the work of big plantations with a mechanized processes. These will change the way you think about tea, and about tea farming.

Introduction to Seasonal Green Tea

This green tea sampler is an intro to hand-picked, organic cultivation tea from small family farms, including 4 unique fresh seasonal picks. We believe that green tea should be as fresh as possible. That is why we work Mrs. Li in Dragonwell and the He Family in Laoshan to buy before the harvest, seal tea in their final bags within days of picking and rush ship each small batch as they are finished. Our partners work hard to manage biodiverse beyond-organic farms, hand pick their tea and carefully hand-finish in small batches to lock in the rich sweet complexity that fine green tea is known for.

Regular Price $62.45 $56.20
Ancient Oolong Craft: Tasting Revival Style with Master Zhang

This bundle includes three 25g bags of oolong tea for 75g total (15 sessions). This special tea sampler highlights Master Zhang’s work to bring back an ancient oolong finishing technique- the Revival Style. This technique comes from years of research, travel and cultural exchange with other oolong communities, and extensive interviews tapping into the oral tradition to uncover the way that oolong was finished long before the modern rolled style that Tieguanyin is famous for. In this kit, you’ll get to explore light roast, dark roast, aged, and varietal comparisons to see how the Revival Style bring oolong to life with deeper aromatics and more powerful texture and aftertaste, all while connecting with a rich tradition of craft that nearly died out over the last few hundred years. The Revival Style takes more than twice as long to make as classic Tieguanyin thanks to the extended yaoqing process of turning and fluffing the leaves and the fact that so much has to be done entirely by hand, but the results are stunning- a half-twisted half-rolled style that Master Zhang describes as a Dragonfly shape.
An Introduction to Oolong Craft

This bundle includes five 25g bags of oolong tea for 125g total (25 sessions). Oolong is the most technically-demanding and time-consuming tea in the world to produce, and our partners take on the challenge relying on their own hands and their senses, not machinery, meaning sleepless nights and 20 hour days in the workshop to finish their tiny micro-batches of varietal-driven oolongs that honor their specific microclimates, from Wudongshan to Daping Village.

This sampler brings together iconic oolong teas from our partners across China to share a glimpse at the magic and complexity that comes out in the long turning and fluffing process that defines oolong teas and gives you a sense of how many styles can exist within this single category, from dark roasts and aged oolong to fresh floral vibrant green oolong.

Regular Price $56.50 $46.33

Introduction to Oolong Craft

This bundle includes four 25g bags of oolong tea and five 7g cakes for 135g total (26 sessions). Oolong is the most technically-demanding and time-consuming tea in [...]

$42.20 $37.98

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