Some Tea With Me

Tag: oolong

  • A One Garden Comparison

    A One Garden Comparison

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    This month’s offering from Global Tea Hut is a pair of organic teas from Mr. Xie in Ming Jian, Nantou, Taiwan. One is processed as a green oolong, lightly roasted. The other is processed as Hóng Chá (红茶), or what we might call “black tea”. Both sets of leaves were made from the same garden and…

  • Painter’s Roast Oolong

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    Of all the many, many (read: too many) teas I brought back from Taiwan, the most eloquent was a small unlabeled pouch of rolled oolong carefully hand-roasted by a man in Lùgǔ (鹿谷鄉). As I’ve just sipped the last of that fine vintage, I thought I might tell you the story of where I found it.…

  • Gui Fei at Stone Leaf Tea House

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    Yesterday was a beautiful lazy Saturday, and my wife had the brilliant suggestion to spend our afternoon drinking tea someplace we don’t get to nearly often enough: Stone Leaf Tea House in Middlebury. As we sat and tasted some fine Gui Fei oolong I realized I have never written about this wonderful tea destination, despite…

  • Cultivars and Places in Tea Names

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    Tea naming is an interesting art, and it’s easy for us Westerners to be confused by the plethora of naming conventions out there. I think a little primer might be helpful. Let’s take a tea name like Gao Shan Ali Shan Jin Xuan Milk Oolong. That’s a lot of words! But we can break it…

  • Shui Mi Xiang from Camellia Sinensis

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    This is a tea I haven’t had before. Shuǐ Mì Xiāng (水蜜香) means “Water Honey Aroma”, or perhaps more lyrically, “Honey-water scent” and it’s easy to see why. The dark twisted leaves give forth a dusty sweet aroma that gave away the family of this tea even before I knew what it was: Guandong oolong. This…

  • Taiwan High Mountain Oolong from Teavivre

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    High mountain oolong (gāo shān wū lóng chá, 高山乌龙茶) almost always refers to a rolled oolong tea grown in Taiwan at a height of more than 1000 meters. Beyond that, it’s really a pretty vague description. As I read somewhere recently, calling tea by a name like this is something like calling a wine, “red…

  • 1995 Tieguanyin From Maokong

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    The leaves of this tea are dark brown, and clearly roasted as I’d expect from an aged oolong. As usual I can’t honestly verify that this tea is actually from 1995, but I know that when I was in the shop purchasing it, we tasted a selection of the owner’s aged Tieguanyin ranging from 1992…

  • Teavivre 2013 Qing Xiang Dong Ding

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    …or, How it’s hard to judge an Oolong before the fourth infusion. This was a sample sent to me from the lovely folks at Teavivre. Dong Ding (sometimes Tung Ting or “Frozen Summit”) is a very beautiful tea mountain in Nantou county near the west coast of Taiwan. They produce a lot of rolled oolongs…

  • 2011 Buddha’s Hand

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    Buddha’s Hand oolong, or Fóshǒu (佛手), is an oolong made from a very large leaf cultivar of Camellia Sinensis. The taste of the tea is a bit of a mystery, because to me it tastes very roasted, but very light at the same time. It’s like Yán chá (rock tea) White tea. I’d really love…

  • Mysterious Ku Fu Phoenix

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    Ming Tao Xuan in Montréal, where I purchased this tea in 2011 has labeled it as “Phoenix Ku Fu Cha (Chinese Red Tea)”, which is confusing in many ways. Its mystery, however, can still be unraveled with some careful tasting. And the process can be so rewarding. My taste buds tell me that this is…