This black tea sampler includes six 25g loose leaf black tea bags picked, finished and packed on small family farms that make some of the best teas in the world, run with the sustainability and beyond-organic practices that can only come from one generation tending land that they will pass down to their children. The rich deep complexity of the finest black teas comes from stringent picking standards for the ideal tender bud and leaf mix, and from slow careful oxidation to bring out more nuance in small batches. This tasting kit is an introduction to the incredible diversity of flavor that our partners offer with their black teas from malty chocolate-driven Laoshan Black from the north of China to traditional and complex Wuyi black teas. Through craft, varietal, and microclimate, our farmer-partners are proud to represent the best that China has to offer.

This special sampler features five 25g bags of golden buddy looseleaf tea. There is nothing like tender downy tea buds, hand-picked in cool early-season weather and hand finished by passionate small family growers. Buds have a unique flavor, and an intense sweetness from the stored sugars and the extremely limited sun exposure. In traditionally crafted black tea this flavor translates to honey, sweet potato, toasty bread, and other rich deep caramelized notes with a thick commanding texture. This tasting kit is an exploration of all the ways buds bring flavor and texture to tea from three different regions and three different farmers dedicated to sustainable farming and meticulous craft.

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.

True Competition-Level Black Tea from Laoshan. This is the earliest, sweetest, most delicate harvest of the year, meticulously hand-rolled and twisted in the style of high-end Wuyi tea. The "gongfu" finish brings out notes of nutmeg, brown sugar, and fine dark chocolate.

This relatively new tea is fed by sweet mountain spring water and oxidized in the sun for three days before finishing to bring out signature chocolate notes. Mr. He perfected this tea as a proud reflection of the bold Shandong spirit and the perseverance of Laoshan Village. Laoshan Black is a labor of love to prove to the world how wonderful teas from Northern China can be. The body is light and smooth, without astringency.

Hand-Twisted Craft Black Tea. First flat-pressed, then hand twisted, Laoshan Gongfu Black is a difficult finish favored by the He Family to bring out sparkling minerality in their tea. This spring tea has notes of rose, caramel flan and tropical citrus.

This unique harvest is an extremely limited offering - part of an advance commission for a special one-off request - with less than two kilos available to share. This is not a tea the He Family stocks or plans as part of their regular harvests, and it is not the wood-fired offering introduced this year. Instead, this is the original, classic, honey-forward juicy aromatic finish that the He Family has done in years past, but with a stunning special grade black tea. The results are a rich, honeyed and tropical black tea, beautifully light and balanced between the black tea's natural sweetness and the wild-foraged osmanthus flowers' beautifully decadent florals. 

The He Family is known for their bold willingness to innovate, and this singular tea is a perfect example of the way they push the boundaries of genre. Wild-picking Laoshan osmanthus and using it to scent buddy resrev-level black tea is still a new craft in Laoshan, just a few years old, but the results have been spectacular, juicy, a and almost oolong-like. This year, He Qingqing wanted to push the idea of oolong inspiration, borrowing roasting craft from Wuyishan and giving her family's black tea a special secondary wood-firing to bring out deep toasty depth. The results really are in the style of teas like Tieluohan. Instead of overwhelming the osmanthus, the roast balances it, adding depth to the honeyed dessert-like qualities of the He Family's black tea.

Jin Jun Mei Wuyi black tea is one of the most labor intensive and demanding teas to produce. Fine Jin Jun Mei is made exclusively from tiny spring buds, and requires thousands and thousands of hand-picked golden buds to make a single pound of finished tea. The result is a downy tea with a thick full texture, and a beautiful elegance. Li Xiangxi's spring-fed tea grows out of rocky, sandy soil, yielding a rich mineral flavor true to Wuyishan's unique terroir.

Li Xiangxi works with her brother and cousins in the Wuyi Ecological Preserve to harvest this propagated-from-seed Xiaozhong varietal leaf and process it using traditional heap oxidization techniques and curling to bring out the tea’s natural complexity. Grown on a hillside in a ravine that collects a pocket of natural mist all morning, the tea buds slowly, yielding an incredibly sweet brew. The tea picks up mineral texture from the rocky volcanic soil and the natural spring water running through the Li Family’s plot. Deeper complexity comes from the natural genetic variation of allowing their Xiaozhong tea to grow from seed instead of cuttings, creating a rich multi-layered taste experience.

The unique flavors of Old Tree Wuyi Gongfu Black comes in part from mosses and competing vegetation that grow naturally on and around the old and untended wild bushes in Tongmu. That mossy, woody complexity is something younger cultivated bushes can’t quite capture. This tea is wild-picke