Spring Harvest 2023 Reveal
Hi everyone!
Exciting news all around, spring harvest has arrived! Below I’ll share some of my brief thoughts on the teas, I truly hope you will love them! Within this batch there is surely a tea for everyone, it’s just a matter of which one will become your favorite of the season... or perhaps year? Stay tuned for more news from me in the coming weeks and months - and if you have any ideas, thoughts or recommendations please send them my way!
-Sam
🏜️ weather report
It was a tough start to the year with a severe drought across the island pushing back harvest dates and contributing to an overall lower yield. Back in 2021 Taiwan made headlines when drought caused reservoirs and Sun Moon Lake to hit record lows. 2023 hasn’t been much different. That being said, similar to 2021 this year’s harvests are unique and delicious in their own way, just less to go around!
🍵 spring tea collection
This spring we have five (5) teas total – three (3) classics, one (1) XXPERIMENTAL, and one (1) secret tea that’ll be released in another month or so! Spring is widely accepted as the highest quality, most highly prized leaves of the year. It’s something really special to be able to enjoy the taste of a season and I hope you enjoy the flavors of 2023.
🍐Unroasted Green Oolong
If you know, you know. This green oolong is first-class! I find this batch to be particularly refreshing, and have noticed it almost reminds me of cold pressed unfiltered evoo. With incredible depth the broth is juicy, structured, and coats the mouth, while leaving a slightly dry sensation on the tongue. Relative to last year’s spring harvest, this tea has a less floral nose and possesses a subtle sweetness.
Tasting notes: sand pear, green banana, snow pea
🍯 Black Oolong
Fact: Everyone loves this oolong. For those who are new to the jinxuan cultivar, this tea was developed by the Taiwanese Tea Research Extension Station to present creamy, milk-like qualities and flavors. When we roast our jinxuan and transform it into our Black Oolong, the result is an incredible chocolatey, honeyed broth. This harvest tastes like a really fruity, super dark single-origin chocolate, the fancy kind 😏.
Tasting notes: cacao, tupelo honey, hazelnut
🍑 Double Red Oolong
Crafted to our specifications only once per year, our Double Red Oolong was our first XXPERIMENTAL tea created in collaboration with our Master Tea Maker. Described in a word, this year’s Double Red is balanced. The aroma packs a lot of roast and is a bit heady with an almost camphor-y or sulfurous presence that lingers in the nose. While drinking, the broth is smooth on the tongue, has a sweetness in the throat, and finishes off sour– a signature of this style of tea. Usually we encourage folks to let this oolong rest for a few months to calm down, however this year it’s open season from day 1!
Tasting notes: Grilled apricot, toasted walnut, jujube
XXPERIMENTAL NO.7
XXPERIMENTAL NO.7 is an incredibly light roast on our favorite unroasted green using qingxin oolong leaves from our farm on Shanlinxi. During the tea making process, we siphoned off a portion of the finished product and decided to continue the roasting process. In all, we roasted this batch for a total of five hours, 2 hours at 70°C, a quick rest, then 3 hours at 75°C. If you’re doing a double take, you’re right! We experimented a few years back and ran this test in the Winter. This year we’re using leaves from the Spring to see if we can bring out even more of that dry mouthfeel by using baseline leaves that will be a bit more floral from the get-go. Without spoiling the surprise, we think this tea is a little sweeter than it’s unroasted counterpart 😊