Tea

Hundred Blessings

Wild Fu’an Da Bai Tea Broom Full and creamy, with dried figs, nutmeg and slight balancing minerality. This is a tea you can and should brew harder and push further than you may usually do with white tea. This tea’s unique shape is a creative utilization of some of the Fu’an Dabai cultivar bushes that have become semi-wild due to less demand for white tea. The shape gives a more tactile than usual experience when handling the brooms, adding to the intimacy of the tea session. The name comes from a Buddhist saying for mindful sweeping: “One sweep, a hundred blessings”.

Island Breeze

Jeju Island Joongjak Tasting notes: Mildly grassy, buttery smooth with umami notes balanced by mild mineral astringency which provides good structure. A classic refreshing green finish. Grown in Korea in volcanic soil on subtropical Jeju Island, it is slso known as “sparrow’s beak,” a second flush picking. This lightly roasted green tea hits above its weight.

Laoshan Hotpot

Laoshan Long Jing Tasting notes: Complex, layered, floral, nutty, vegetal, oily umami broth. Rich and deep yet mellow in the mouth – this tea has it all. Pickings are small leaf, tippy (but without silver hairs) and tightly rolled, but not compressed like a Tie Guan Yin. The varietal grown is Long Jing #43 and as such the tea from Laoshan shares its character.

Mettle Matriarch

Bulang Old Tree White Tasting notes: Leaves from 80+ year old trees yield a fruit salad zestiness, fresh cork bite, with depth, character and finishing dryness. This tea offers Puer sweetness and an elderly tree mouthfeel with almost zero sharpness. A close parallel might be a brown shoumei, but this particular white tea has a more enduring fragrance, thicker soup, and a slightly cork/barky edge.

Mist Orchid

Light Roasted Qi Lan Wuyi Yancha Tasting notes: Soft creamy almond and orchid notes over honey mineral sweetness; emerging stone fruit and light baked grains. Cool and lingering finish. A lightly roasted rock oolong in order to preserve the cultivar’s natural almond-tinged aroma. It has a naturally sweet rounded texture with almost no astringency.

Oracle Stave

Yellow Kukicha Tasting notes: Sunflower seeds, pine nuts, toasted sesame sweetness. This is, without exaggeration, the best thing to ever happen to stem tea. Processed as green tea, stems can sometimes give off rough astringency; as a red tea, they can come out weak, albeit sweet. Yet, as a yellow tea, stems offer up a uniquely rich, nutty, sweet, and roasty taste. The closest analogue in the tea world is Japan’s Hoji-kukicha, but the balance between sweetness and roastiness is unrivalled. There are no sour or sharp notes lurking below the surface. Being a stem tea, it is naturally lower in caffeine though it still contains some.

Osmanthus Black

Guihua Hong Tasting notes: Chocolate, caramel, orange cake, flower petals in the summer sun. Both warming and sweet, it is ideal for crisp Autumn and Winter mornings. The dry leaves of the Guihua Hong has an incredibly sweet fruity floral nose to it, due to the inclusion of dried osmanthus flowers (guihua). This is the only blended tea I am offering so far on the website, and the blend is very modest, with less than 5% flowers to 95% tea.

Purple Buds

Wild Tree Ya Bao Tasting notes: Heated sauna cedar, tulsi, hot stones, sweet pine. A super fragrant, crisp and almost clear brew. Made from var. Assamica Dehongensis, this unique tea is created from the lateral buds of the plant which would otherwise go on to form branches as opposed to leaves. The purple-hued buds are rich in anthocyanins (which offer humans a variety of potential health benefits, including reduced inflammation and improved cardiovascular health) and produce a distinctive and complex tea, characterized by sweet woody notes and a cooling finish.

Red Snail

Red Bi Luo Chun Tasting notes: Cacao, leather, dark ripe fruit, molasses, resin, warm spice. Rounded, oily and slightly mineral finish.

Rhyme Orchid

Charcoal Roasted Wuyi Yancha Tasting notes: A medium roasted rock oolong with strong orchid notes and a warm toffee woodiness. Reminiscent of bush honey and butter slathered on homemade rye toast. Produced in the rocky terroir of Wuyi, North-Eastern Fujian, this Qilan is slightly more roasted than our other Qilan (Mist Orchid) in order to preserve the cultivar’s natural almond-tinged perfume, warm spices, sweet minerality, and thick, smooth mouthfeel.

Silver Needle

Da Bai Yin Zhen Tasting notes: Ripe pear, leather, old wooden furniture, hay and spring flowers. Thick, silky texture and clean, refreshing finish.

Snail Shell Spring

Biluochun Tasting notes: This tea has a lovely light mineral astringency that balances its umami notes. Vegetal, dry grass with a savoury crisp iceberg lettuce finish. A wonderful brew for long hot summer days.

Spring Sprite

Organic Wuyi Lao Cong Shui Xian Tasting notes: A medium roast oolong with notes of roasted nuts, pastry crust, coffee and sweet wet wood. Comforting, buttery mouthfeel and long lasting sweet mineral finish.

Tong Mu Dawn

Tong Mu Zhengshan XiaoZhong Tasting notes: Drinking chocolate, red fruits, yellow roses and dark honey. Smooth and buttery with a lingering wet rock finish. An unsmoked lapsang from the famed Tong Mu village, with tea leaves collected from wilder bushes growing around the village. Being unsmoked, the bright fruit and wood notes are allowed to fully shine.

Treasure Glade

Autumn 2013 Shou Mei White Tea Cake – 357g Tasting notes: Summer forest earthiness, but light with malted rock sugars and pastry; honey and dates, rum-candied fruit and a slightly medicinal forest florality (think also a well-balanced Botrytis Riesling). Warm, thick and velvety smooth texture and mild mineral dryness. One of my favourite teas that is immensely transporting. Everyone will of course have their own associations but for me by the second infusion I’m back in Portugal, rock climbing on a south-facing crag in the very late afternoon sun with enveloping wafts of warm earth and wild flowers. Wrapped for us by our supplier with our art work.

Treasured Consort

Nantou Gui Fei Tasting notes: Honey orchid, apricot tart, sweet leather, mineral dryness, full body, oily finish.