We've been doing this since 2005, and some of you have been with us since then. And obviously some of you have joined us in the last couple of years. Whichever you are, we sincerely thank you for supporting us and being part of our tea community. When I was a kid in school we used to sing the song 'make new friends and keep the old, one is silver and the other gold'. Our loyal customers new and old are like precious jewels to us. For us, this business is about connecting with people, of course you feed us and keep a roof over our heads (no small feat in Seattle), but you also make every day worth being excited about. When we run into questions of tea, how to pack, how to prepare, what to source, our toppest of top priorities is, 'how can we give our customers our very best?'.
We've learned a lot about doing business - as well as tea - in the last 18 years. We've become more and more clear about what we want from this business too. We want to honor tea, make good tea that we care about available to people, and we want to make tea friends who will enjoy them. It's too easily forgotten that business is a connection between people. An exchange of money for goods is how we express it, but a purely transactional relationship only feeds our bellies, not our souls. Getting to know a person through his or her taste in tea, learning together and laughing together is what makes this worth doing on a daily basis. Thank you for being there for us as we do our best to be there for you.
Happy anniversary, we hope you like sales because that's what we got you 😁
With love,
Shiuwen, Noah and Sunny
Floating Leaves Tea
Both addresses will point to the same website, and orders placed on this website will ship out of our brick and mortar location in Seattle, Washington.
When we originally opened the Taiwan site, we had planned to rely on direct shipping from Taiwan to take the load off of us (Shiuwen and Noah) in Seattle to free us up to do other things. But because of international shipping issues, this caused more work rather than less. We quickly pivoted to expand the newly opened 'US Site' at that time. This of course caused a lot of confusion, but we wanted to see what would happen, so we gave it two years.
Now, it is pretty clear to us that the two site method is too confusing, and packages are still not being tracked from Taiwan. As our business grows, keeping track of two inventories and tracking down frequently lost packages is too much. Therefore we are suspending direct shipping from the Taiwan warehouse indefinitely to focus our energies on sourcing teas, online tea education, and in-person tea classes.
As we shift back to the one website model, we will take advantage of an opportunity to give the website a facelift, including organizing our vaults of educational content into one central, searchable platform! We are excited to begin working on this ‘tea library’ project, and make our tea brewing and tea appreciation classes more accessible.
We sincerely thank our community of tea friends for keeping up with these changes, and for going through this experiment with us. We strive to do better every year!
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The first two are old fashioned, old world cultivars : Wuyi and Tie Guanyin. They come from a traditional tea outfit in Taipei who still do business like the old world too, they roast with strong fire and set aside to produce ‘reserve’ teas. They each have about 10 years of age on them, and have developed rich earthy tones while most of the fiery roast has receded into sweet plummy flavors.
Both have excellent balance and luxurious mouthfeel. The Wuyi is bigger on flavor, while the Tie Guanyin is more concentrated on 'yun' 韻 a special kind of aftertaste that shows up in the back of the throat. We haven't had a good traditional Tie Guanyin for years, and although this is not exactly like the Muzha version, it is satisfying in much the same way. We love them both!
These teas taste a lot like a mainland Chinese oolong, another reason they get the title 'heritage'. The maker retained many old world techniques as well as cultivars. You have to know what you’re looking for to pick up on the Northern Taiwanese terroir. The tea garden where these leaves were harvested – in Shi-Ding A.K.A. Baozhong country – primarily maintains these heritage cultivars.
The third tea is over 40 years old, produced in 1979. It was harvested in Beipu where, at that time, many gardens were producing ‘Formosa Oolong’ for export to the West. This particular base tea was solid and clean, and thanks to the magic of time (along with excellent storage) it has developed into something quite delicious. Rich, deep amber broth and full body energy.
Not everyone will like the earthy taste of aged oolong, but this tea is an excellent litmus test for what clean aged oolong should taste like. To us, it is a treasure.
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We met with a lot of new farmers and makers, and only selected a few into our lineup. One of those new sources produced this excellent, organically grown Buddha Hand! A tasty roasted tea with plenty of aging potential. Buddha Hand is a cultivar that, when treated properly, can produce a rich fruity aroma and thick body. It's a very fun cultivar, with the giant leaves that you can observe in the above picture.
We are very proud to carry this one. The farmer has the goal of 'giving the tea garden back to nature'. This plot was converted from a bamboo forest to a tea garden about 7 years ago, and he is utilizing natural farming techniques to return a sustainable bounty for many generations. We were lucky to procure a decent amount of this tea! He has single customers that buy 10 pounds or more for personal use, with the plan of aging long term! In other words, he would have no trouble selling this tea retail, so we are very grateful that he would share with us. The tea has a sweet aroma and open, airy feel that reflects its natural farming.
The other tea is a Dong Ding with a story. This tea was a product of me getting covid when I was in Taiwan. I wasn't able to visit Dong Ding at the same time as a close tea friend, the man who introduced us to Farmer Su. So our friend went up to Dong Ding on his own. He had a strong intention to find a bold bodied tea base and ask Mrs Su to roast it a bit extra. He spent days tasting through different crops of tea from the Su's friends and relations to find the perfect tea that could handle a deeper roast. Our friend takes a very exacting approach to tea and taste.
I wouldn't have thought to do this, because we are so fond of the Traditonal A already. When he finished the first batch he excitedly picked up the phone to give me a call, and said that it was fantastic! Rich fruity aroma and full bodied mouthfeel. This is the Special Roast Dong Ding. It is from a different garden from the Traditional A, and the feel is more solid and composed, with a fruit forward approach. So we decided to carry both concurrently. Although all of our traditional Dong Ding teas are well suited to aging, this 'Special Roast' was made with the forethought that it would keep for many years and improve with age. It is tasting fantastic now, but we are looking forward to May of this year when we feel it will be more integrated and smooth. Then we are also planning on setting aside some to age for the long term. Grand Reserve 'Special Roast' Dong Ding in ten years? Maybe...
We are doing this (1) to be more congruent across our two websites and (2) because grams are just a better and more universal measure for tea leaves.
If you’re a math whiz you may know an ounce is closer to 28 grams. However, we’ve always measured out a bit of extra tea for every bag, and multiples of 30 are much easier to work with anyway.
If you have any questions please email us at tea@floatingleaves.com
Thank you,
Noah
Floating Leaves Tea
]]>In Taiwan, two harvests per year (Winter and Spring) are the most coveted. Winter is known for producing a much lower yield and more intense fragrance than Spring teas.
Noah has been in Taiwan for the last three weeks sourcing teas, and has been blessed to find some excellent offerings from this Winter's harvest.
This year the weather was slightly uncooperative, and due to excessive rains and warm temps, we've pivoted on a few teas to new sources. What we've discovered is, although conventionally grown teas can be extremely fragrant during good seasons, they are less resilient on challenging seasons. However, teas grown without agrochemicals show more resilience. We call these teas 'unsprayed' because, although they are grown without synthetic fertilizers, the farmers have not bothered to get organic certifications.
The conventional teas that we've chosen come from microclimates that faired well this year. However, you'll also notice we have a new source for Alishan (called Plum Blossom) as well as a Shan Lin Xi from a new source.
We're passionate about finding new sources for tasty, organic teas (a surprisingly rare combination -- often organic teas are not that tasty, they can be weak and flavorless). This is one of the main reasons Noah is in Taiwan right now, and we're very very blessed to have stumbled upon some excellent sources. The new Shan Lin Xi is grown on a sustainable farm, and processed by a supremely skilled maker who is able to call out gorgeous aroma on top of tightly structured broth. We're super excited about it!
Please be aware : Because these unsprayed teas don't use synthetic fertilizers, they don't have as punchy of a fragrance as their conventional counterparts. If you have been drinking our conventionally grown high mountains, we recommend starting with a small quantity of the unsprayed teas first. These teas have a more relaxed, flowing fragrance that, once you get used to, is the most comfortable fragrance imaginable.
We hope you enjoy these intense aromatic high elevation teas this Winter, both for their refreshing qualities and to remind you of the perpetual bounty of Spring that is currently resting for the season. Wishing you many happy sips!
Shiuwen, Noah and Sunny
Floating Leaves Tea
]]>We’ve got an updated list of 4 charcoal fired oolongs that are ready to go out into the world! All on our website now. Quantities are limited, some are only a single bamboo basket’s worth of tea.
Also, read to the bottom for more info on an upcoming Live Session.
We’ll be offering a live Tea Class on IG and YouTube on September 27th.
We will compare the raw and finished version of Heartwood Hongshui. The goal is to give an example of what charcoal roasting does, beyond add a roasted taste to tea. The materials are available to anyone who places an order on our shop this week.
What you have to do :
Note : Just make sure you either (1) buy a bag of finished Heartwood to compare or (2) already have some Heartwood in your tea stash.
Charcoal roasting is more than just adding a heavy roasted flavor to a tea. Charcoal is a natural heat source for finishing oolong teas, and was traditionally the only way to finish oolong tea before the dawn of electricity. It is not always heavy handed, and can bring out levels of nuance and detail. Like a wood fired pizza oven, a proper charcoal roast provides tea with a little extra something from the natural world.
A charcoal fire is a living fire. From the moment it is lit to the last embers ten days later, it is always changing. It is the job of the charcoal roaster to listen carefully to determine when the shape of the fire ‘fits’ the character of the tea to be roasted. A good charcoal roast utilizes the natural vibrations of the fire to clean up and enhance the vibrations of the tea.
When I first walked into Shiuwen's shop ten years ago, she brewed Master Zhan's charcoal fired Dong Ding for me and it opened up a door in my life. I'd already known that I was fascinated by tea, but this particular tea changed my understanding of what a good tea can do. This was the beginning of my path to start drinking tea with my body and my mind together, and before long I decided I wanted to be able to replicate what our teacher was doing.
Finally after many years of studying tea, Master Zhan took me on as a student to learn the art of charcoal roasting.
I spent a few months in Taiwan in Spring of 2021 to study with our teacher, and when I got home I began work on my charcoal roasting room. In November of 2021, I did my first roast, which was very educational. It took almost 8 months of 'tuition' roasts before, in July of 2022, I finally have a tea that has shone through the fire.
We are so excited and proud to share the fruits of our hard work with you. Because we get the raw tea direct from the farmer and do the work of finishing it ourselves, we are able to offer very clean and healthy teas for a good price. We hope you will enjoy them and brew them for your friends and loved ones.
Sincerely,
Noah and the Floating Leaves Family
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