Verdant Tea

This experimental loose leaf black tea is made by the Liu family with leaves from their Tieguanyin tea plants. The inspiration for this tea is Wuyi Xiao Zhong, a traditional and full-bodied black tea from Wuyishan (sometimes smoked with special pine wood). You might expect a bracing and full bodied tea, but when you taste this Tieguanyin varietal processed as a curled, roasted black tea, you find something quite different. Cozy and satisfying, this tea has an unmistakable floral Tieguanyin core under the black tea finishing.

The Liu Family has been quietly cultivating incredible 'off the beaten path' Tieguanyin for generations on their mountaintop family plot. Their old-growth tea plants benefit from deep roots, rocky soil and daily clouds and mist shading the plants from excess sun. The result is a complex Tieguanyin full of classic creamy notes, along with a unique spiced quality that expresses the Longjuan climate.

This aged release from the Liu Family in Longjuan captures the depth, complexity and nuance of their family's unique mountaintop terroir, brought to new levels of depth with over a decade of careful aging. The Liu Family re-roasts their Tieguanyin annually for a full five years to control for moisture and ensure slow even change. This tea is packed with deep sweet, cooling notes and a mossy evergreen quality all its own

This experimental loose leaf black tea is made by the Liu family with leaves from their Tieguanyin tea plants. The inspiration for this tea is Wuyi Xiao Zhong, a traditional and full-bodied black tea from Wuyishan (sometimes smoked with special pine wood). You might expect a bracing and full bodied tea, but when you taste this Tieguanyin varietal processed as a curled, roasted black tea, you find something quite different. Cozy and satisfying, this tea has an unmistakable floral Tieguanyin core under the black tea finishing.

This fun, experimental black tea is pressed after finishing into single-serving 7g mini-cakes. Like the Liu Family's loose leaf Tieguanyin XIao Zhong, the inspiration for this tea is Wuyi Xiao Zhong, a traditional and full-bodied black tea from Wuyishan (sometimes smoked with special pine wood). You might expect a bracing and full bodied tea, but when you taste this Tieguanyin varietal processed as a pressed black tea, you find something different. The Liu Family has created a tea that is full of juicy fruity notes, rich spice and savory undertones. The mini-cake format of this tea makes for convenient brewing, aging and transportation.

The Liu Family has been quietly cultivating incredible 'off the beaten path' Tieguanyin for generations on their mountaintop family plot. Their old-growth tea plants benefit from deep roots, rocky soil and daily clouds and mist shading the plants from excess sun. The result is a complex Tieguanyin full of classic creamy notes, along with a unique spiced quality that expresses the Longjuan climate.

This aged release from the Liu Family in Longjuan captures the depth, complexity and nuance of their family's unique mountaintop terroir, brought to new levels of depth with over a decade of careful aging. The Liu Family re-roasts their Tieguanyin annually for a full five years to control for moisture and ensure slow even change. This tea is packed with deep sweet, cooling notes and a mossy evergreen quality all its own

This bundle includes three 25g bags of aged oolong tea and one 90 gram cake for 165g total (33 sessions).

Taste through the decades with this selection of hand-picked and hand fired oolongs from Master Zhang in Daping Village and the Li Family in Wuyishan. Our partners have opened their reserves of aged oolongs, including selections decades-old. Fine aged oolongs are carefully re-roasted yearly to control for moisture and maintain optimal conditions for flavor texture and aroma to keep building complexity over time. As Zhang Rongde explains, "Tea may be dried, but it is still living inside. In roasting, you need to have experience. You need to understand the tea, the leaves, the fire. Only then can you make good tea."

This sampler shows off how differently teas can age. You can expect a diverse range of flavors, united by an inexplicable depth and commanding texture only possible through perfect finishing and patient aging.

This bundle includes three 90g mini cakes and one 100g mini cake of Wuyi tea for 370g total (72+ sessions). The Li Family makes some of the most sought-after oolongs in China, grown within the pristine Wuyishan Ecological Preserve, hand-picked  and hand-finished by the Li Family and meticulously had-fired multiple times over several months for deep complexity. The biodiversity and rocky geography of their plot contributes to deep forest-evoking teas with a strong mineral texture.

Take all this exquisite circumstance and add aging into the process and you get some stunningly nuanced powerful teas unlike anything else out there. This tasting kit is a chance to build your own Wuyi tea aging program, and see why pu’er isn’t the only tea that gets better with age. This collection spans twelve years and four unique varietals.

Most years, Li Xiangxi doesn’t do any pressing at all, only selecting harvests that she has had the chance to taste over several months when she determines whether they’d be suitable for aging. When she makes her selection, the family gives these teas even deeper hand-firing before finally pressing these mini-cakes. See for yourself what makes aged Wuyi tea so special.

This bundle includes five 25g bags of Anxi oolong tea for 125g total (25 sessions). With one of the highest elevation, most pristine perfectly-situated plots for Tieguanyin in the world, it would make perfect sense for Master Zhang to devote every inch of land to this famous and in-demand varietal. Yet, Master Zhang does the opposite. Over the last decade, he has reclaimed the majority of his Daping mountainside for bamboo, evergreens and wildflowers. The precious rocky terraces he has left, carved into steep hills, he devotes not just to the famous Tieguanyin, but to dozens of rare, unknown varietals.

Master Zhang fosters these tiny groves of rare tea to preserve biodiversity and have a local “seed bank” of sorts, allowing hearty individual tea bushes to grow and thrive in Daping so that other farmers and colleagues could grow new plants from cuttings, and study the way their famous terroir changes with each varietal.

The benefit for all of us is getting to dive deep and experience rare out there flavors, textures and aromas- all unique expressions of Master Zhang’s craft and terroir. Every tea in this kit expresses the "core" sweet minerality of Daping, but from unique and incredible perspectives not often tasted in a region so dedicated to Tieguanyin.