Verdant Tea

This tea highlights Mr. He’s delicate and meticulous hand rolling and straightening technique developed in producing Pine Needle Green, but introducing traditional sun-oxidation to make a rich and deeply complex black tea. The result is Lashan’s most mineral-forward and complex black tea to date. This tea is fed by mountain spring water, picked by hand, and cultivated sustainably using traditional chemical-free farming techniques including growing rows of soybean between rows of tea to restore nitrates to the soil. The finished tea picks up the rocky minerality of the soil, and careful low temperature roasting brings out deep brown sugar sweetness.

This year is the sixth fantastic harvest of the He Family's new osmanthus-scented black tea. Once again, the He Family is sharing a rich reserve-level Autumn Harvest Laoshan Black, scented during finishing with tiny hand-picked Laoshan Osmanthus flowers. The brown sugar, honey and fruity chocolate notes are melded together perfectly with the luscious almost creamy floral of the He Family’s meticulously hand-harvested Osmanthus blossoms. This tea is one of the hardest to make in the He Family collection since the local osmanthus blossoms are so small that they have to pick thousands just to make tiny batch of finished tea, but the results are worth the effort.

The He Family’s Most Popular Tea. This cool autumn season harvest black tea is packed with flavor and aromatics, fully oxidized and roasted to achieve the iconic malty, chocolatey, honeyed Laoshan Black flavor.

This bundle includes six 25g bags of Wuyi tea for 150g total (30 sessions). This special limited-offering tasting kit is a chance to do a unique taste-off showdown of three of Wuyishan’s most sought after varietals, crafted by the Li family as both oolong and black tea for six unique offerings. The purpose of this kit is to show off the intense influence of craft on finished tea, even when that tea is the same varietal grown by the same family in the same place. Mei Zhan, Bai Rui Xiang and Rou Gui are all famous Wuyi teas traditionally finished as oolongs. Indeed, all three have brought the Li Family best in show awards year after year. Recently, the Li Family has begun to apply their masterful traditional black tea craft to famous "oolong" varietals at the family workshop in Tongmu, yielding exciting new ways to taste and feel the terroir of the region. This kit will let you compare oolong and black tea finishes on the same varietals while these unique limited harvest offerings are available.

This tea is wild-foraged by the Li Family of the Dongsa Cooperative within the Mt Ailao National Forest Preserve. The silvery buds and twisting golden leaves are picked from ancient tea trees between one hundred and eight hundred years old scattered between other evergreens, and wildflowers on the rocky mountainside. This incredibly labor-intensive tea to harvest is actually allowed to sun-roast and oxidize without applying heat in a wok. Because more moisture is retained in the leaf, this black tea is a fantastic candidate for aging like traditional sheng pu’er. Only a high-elevation remote place like Qianjiazhai can count on enough sunlight in the spring for this old but rare finishing technique. The result is a tea with the sweet malt of a black tea but the staggering complexity and herbaceous undertones of a sheng pu’er. The loose Maocha is lightly steamed and then meticulously rolled and shaped one pearl at a time by Master Zhou without the use of molds or machinery to preserve the delicate complexity of the tea.

This unique black tea is picked from the early spring leaves and tender buds of the Camellia Crassicolumna tree, a close relative of the tea plant native to Qianjiazhai. Crassicolumna is naturally caffeine-free and high in antioxidants. Since Crassicolumna is native to the Qianjiazhai region, there are many examples of staggeringly old Crassicolumna trees. Mr. Li of the cooperative is actually employed by the local government as an environmental protection officer to make sure these ancient trees are protected from poaching, where outsiders would sneak in in the cover of darkness to cut the tall trees and quickly harvest their precious leaves. Mr. Li has found that the best way to protect the trees is to allow sustainable wild foraging by the people living in the protected region in exchange for their help watching over remote Crassicolumna groves. This extremely rare and labor-intensive to harvest offering is allowed to slowly sun-roast to oxidize and finished as a unique black tea with a rich fruity but wild flavor, all without the caffeine you’d see in camellia sinensis. 

Golden Strand is one of Yunnan's iconic "Dian Hong" black teas, hand picked and carefully shaped to show off luxurious downy buds and golden color. Wang Yanxin has a longstanding relationship with a farmer's cooperative in Lincang, giving her access to this competition-grade te, with a distinctive flavor unlike Golden Fleece or classic Yunnan Golden Buds style black teas. The Golden Strand has a more buttery and rich flavor. with notes of whipped cream, graham cracker, fruit pie and clove.

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.

We are so excited to finally be representing such a talented family in world-famous Qimen after a ten year search for the right partners. The Cheng family takes their work seriously and the proof is in the tea. Their classic Qimen is packed with sweet, honeyed notes, floral complexity and beautiful malty undertones thanks to the careful picking and slow, small-batch hand-finishing process that Master Cheng uses.