Spring Tea Tour

It's that time of year again, Spring tea tour and tea-buying time!

The first 11 days of May will be our annual Taiwan Tea Tour. I am grateful that I will have a full tour again this year and I will do my best to update the trip regularly through this blog.

Both the Floating Leaves Tea Shop and online tea shop will be closed from May 2nd to May 24th. If you need to stock up on your tea, please do it soon. I hope to bring back more tasty teas from this trip.

A New Lishan

Thank you all for liking the winter high mountain Oolong. We were all lucky to have enjoyed quite a good season for Taiwan Oolongs. All of my high mountain teas sold out quite quickly, but I ordered a new batch of Lishan and it arrived three days ago. When I first tried the tea, I found it to be floral and full bodied. The scent was beautiful and present in all six infusions that I made. Today, I tried the tea again and there is a nice smoothness that has started showing up. I was very excited about it. As I have mentioned before, when a tea is shipped over, it might take some time for it open up and develop, so I am looking forward to seeing even more roundness from this Lishan and possibly some surprising notes. When you have a chance, please come and taste the tea with me. Some people have asked me if this is a spring tea. This Lishan is still a winter Oolong. Yes, farmers have just started to harvest spring teas in Taiwan, but the harvests are mostly for lower elevation teas. Any recent harvesting of higher elevation teas would be for varietals like Jin Xuan. Our high mountain oolongs are made with the Chin Hsin varietal, which grows slower than a lot of other oolong varietals. In a region like Fu Shou Shan or Da Yu Ling, we might need to wait until the middle of May for the harvest and production to be completed.

A Video on Tea Buying

As you may remember, my friend Jennifer Sauer (Bon Teavant) joined me on my Taiwan tour last May. She was very kind to produce some wonderful tea videos from our journey together. I have to admit that it was nerve-racking to watch myself in the video and to hear a voice that I can't believe came from me. Jennifer made a video about how I go about choosing a tea for purchase; the link is below. I hope that it is both informative and enjoyable for you to watch! Please let me know what you think of it and I hope that I can provide even more useful and interesting content for everyone in the future. Enjoy!

http://bonteavant.com/2011/03/tea-buying-high-mountain-oolong.html

Yixing Teapots

As I mentioned in my previous post, some online customers asked me to find them some Yixing teapots. I finally found several recently and wanted to figure out what kind of tea suits each Yixing teapot before I posted them on the website for sale. But before I had time to finish my project, many of the pots had already been sold!

I have just posted the remaining pots on the website so that everyone can have a chance to look at them. I will be updating everyone about what I find out about their qualities (slowly) on the website.


*This photo is provided by Douglas King: www.douglaskingphoto.com

Yixing Tea Pots

Some of you who don't live in Seattle have asked me to find some suitable yixing pots for you and to put some of my teapots on the website. I am finally getting my act together and will be posting some Yixing pots on my site.

I mostly drink Taiwanese Oolongs, a little bit of Chinese Oolongs and Puer in the winter, so the pots I will select and post will be for the teas that I drink.

I got the following pot from a tea friend. She has used this pot for 8 years for lightly oxidized Tieguanyin from China. She said she can't drink that tea anymore and has been drinking shou Puer. She sold me the pot and I have been testing it out on some high mountain oolongs from Taiwan and it works beautifully. It's a small and adorable pot. It holds around 70ml of liquid.

Next, I got this pot (below) around two years ago. I have mostly been brewing shou puer with it. It was owned and used by someone else before I obtained it and I don't know how many years it has been used prior to my possession. It also holds around 70 ml of liquid.

These two pots will be on the website soon and there will be more coming on as well.