Eco-Cha Tea Club
Award-Winning Alishan High Mountain Oolong Tea | Eco-Cha Tea Club
Batch 105 of the Eco-Cha Tea Club is a spring 2024 Award-Winning Alishan High Mountain Oolong Tea. This batch of tea was entered into the Alishan Farmers' Association Qing Xin Oolong competition and ranked within the top 36% of all entries. Our source who entered it was not totally satisfied with this ranking, and felt it should have achieved a higher award. He was tentatively planning on removing the tea from its award-winning packaging and storing it to enter into the next competition, for which he would need to pay the entry feed a second time. That's where we seized the opportunity to buy the batch in full and offer it to the tea club!
Award Winning Alishan Jin Xuan Oolong Tea : Eco-Cha Tea Club
Batch 91 of the Eco-Cha Tea Club is an Alishan Jin Xuan Oolong Tea that received Gold Medal Award in the Meishan Farmers' Association spring 2023 Jin Xuan Competition. The Jin Xuan Competition is separate from the main competition of Qing Xin Oolong — the original tea strain from China that is used for making High Mountain Oolong Tea, unless otherwise specified. We shared this same award winning tea as batch 22 of the Tea Club about six years ago. It's a worthy category to represent as one of Taiwan's specialty Oolongs, and we are happy to have a chance to share it again.
Alishan Small Leaf Type Black Tea | Eco-Cha Tea Club
Batch 83 of the Eco-Cha Tea Club is an Alishan Small Leaf Type Black Tea made by our source of Alishan High Mountain Oolong and Alishan High Mountain Jin Xuan Oolong. They picked some of their Jin Xuan summer crop when it was still immature. These young tender leaves from the second flush (summer crop) are ideal for making Black Tea. Jin Xuan is the name of Taiwan's most popular hybrid small leaf type tea.
Alishan Jin Xuan Osmanthus Tea Tasting Notes | Eco-Cha Tea Club
Batch 73 begins our seventh year of the Eco-Cha Tea Club, and we get to celebrate the occasion with a type of tea we've never sourced before. It's a soothing, delicate, yet full-bodied character of tea that combines a classic top quality Alishan High Mountain Jin Xuan Oolong with fresh Osmanthus flowers. The intrinsically pronounced creamy character of the Alishan Jin Xuan infused with the essence of Osmanthus flowers offers an exceptionally soft and satisfying flavor profile.
Alishan Jin Xuan Osmanthus Tea | Eco-Cha Tea Club
Our friend's mom and aunties picked thousands of Osmanthus blooms by hand last month in order to make special batches of flower blended tea. He related how decades ago, when Taiwan High Mountain Tea first became popular, it was often described as having an Osmanthus flower fragrance.
Alishan High Mountain Tea Tasting Notes | Eco-Cha Tea Club
Batch #50 of the Eco-Cha Tea Club starts off 2020 with a freshly harvested Alishan High Mountain Oolong Winter Tea from our ongoing source in Meishan Township. This very small batch of tea was their final day of winter harvest. The leaves were not yet fully mature, and offer a fresh, distinctly aromatic and complex flavor profile.
Alishan High Mountain Oolong Tea | Eco-Cha Tea Club
The photo above is this month's batch of the Eco-Cha Tea Club undergoing solar withering on November 11, 2019. This was the final day of winter harvest for our source of Alishan High Mountain Oolong Tea, and we were able to procure enough of this very minimal batch to share with our Tea Club. This date was 3 days after Li Dong (立冬) in the lunar calendar, and the winter harvest of High Mountain Tea had for the most part been completed in central Taiwan.
Alishan High Mountain Black Tea Tasting Notes| Eco-Cha Tea Club
Eco-Cha Tea Club's batch #48 is Alishan High Mountain Black Tea. It has a very balanced, integrated flavor profile, and offers subtle notes of a Qing Xin Oolong. The brewed leaves still have a greenish hue, even though the stems are quite reddish, indicating nearly full oxidation. It is an interesting hybrid of tea types, but definitely acts more like a Black Tea made from the small leaf type Qing Xin strain.
Alishan High Mountain Black Tea | Eco-Cha Tea Club
Batch #48 of the Eco-Cha Tea Club is an Alishan High Mountain Black Tea. Our source of Alishan High Mountain Oolong and Alishan High Mountain Jin Xuan Oolong makes Black Tea from his summer crop of Qing Xin Oolong tea leaves. The summer crop is actually a bumper crop from their spring harvest. The new leaf growth that was too immature to pick at spring harvest is allowed to continue growing to at least half maturity before it is harvested and processed as Small Leaf Black Tea.
Alishan Late Spring Oolong Tea Tasting Notes | Eco-Cha Tea Club
The complex aroma of the brewed tea leaves has subtle hints of a bug bitten character, but not very obvious. The sufficient oxidation offers a fresh scone scent, with a touch of honey, making us think that there is some influence from the Green Leafhopper. It is very likely that this note is subtle due to the fact that it had rained very near harvest time, which is said to dilute or dissipate the chemical compounds that are responsible for this character of flavor. The texture is smooth and balanced, with delicate complexity.
Alishan Late Spring Oolong Tea | Eco-Cha Tea Club
We discovered this batch of tea through our mentor, Lisa Lin, who had already purchased a significant amount of this day's harvest. We introduced Lisa to Mr. Ye a few years ago, and she has been sourcing batches of bug bitten spring tea from him every year since. About a month ago, we were sitting at Lisa's tea table, and just happened to ask if she had bought any spring tea from Mr Ye. She said yes, and promptly brewed some for us to try. We were impressed, and called Mr. Ye the next day to see if any of this day's harvest was still available. He said yes.
Light Roast Concubine Oolong Tea | Eco-Cha Tea Club
Andy visited the farm a second time because the older brother had told him that he had transitioned his own plots of tea to completely natural farming, i.e. not using any chemical pesticides or fertilizers. The image above clearly shows the contrast of a transitional plot of tea in the foreground, compared to the commercially farmed plots of tea on the neighboring farm below in the background.
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