Dance of the Tea Teaser Out Now

We just released the first teaser for our Taiwan Oolong Documentary! The Dance of the Tea.

This is the first installment in a series of teasers, all organized around elements of tea. This first is focussed on the actual leaves, farms and processing. You can see Dong Ding mountain and the tea fields there. The farmer we have bought tea from for a decade is in there, a thin man with white hair. He will show up in later videos.

Please enjoy and stay tuned for more teasers. We think the way the leaves dance is so beautiful!

Special thanks to Jake Knapp who filmed and edited the video and to Jon Davis who contributed music for this piece.

Waking Up Aged Oolong

Aged oolongs can have a soothing energy. They are usually temperamental, and sometimes sour, but if you nurture them they can be full of life and delicious. And they will have a story to tell you. Part of the process of nurturing aged oolongs is waking up the tea.

When I talk about waking up a tea, I do this with heat. This is also called spot roasting, or touching up a tea. It is like roasting it just slightly, right before brewing. The simplest way is to get a candle, like a tea light, with a low flame. You can use a small sheet of paper, resting one pots worth of tea on the paper. Hold it above the flame so that a gentle heat starts to warm up the leaves (and not burn the paper at all!!). The goal is not to roast the tea, but merely to push out the slowly accumulated moisture. You can also make an apparatus to roast aged teas with an old teapot and a candle based teapot warmer as in this picture.

However you wake it up, the tea will taste cleaner, more direct and more full. The moisture that gets stuck in an aged tea can be like a glass wall between the tea and the drinker.

Our ‘66 Aged Beipu, for example, benefits from a quick spot roast. As it is, the tea is herbal, medicinal and smooth. When I feel like using some extra time and energy, I spot roast this tea as a step in my brewing process to produce an even more delicious pot of tea.


Written by: Noah