Eco-Cha Tea Club

Batch 86 of the Eco-Cha Tea Club is a Shan Lin Xi High Mountain Oolong Tea that stands apart in both its quality and the pristine environment in which it grows. Read about the farm and its caretakers in our sourcing post, and watch the video below for visuals of its environs.

Batch 82 of the Eco-Cha Tea Club is a Li Shan High Mountain Oolong Tea, second flush of 2022. The weather during the spring growing season that produced the first flush remained unusually cool, resulting in a slower growth cycle that produced a character of tea that was a mix of winter and spring qualities. The weather during  the second flush growing period was a combination of spring and summer weather at high elevation. This produced leaves that acted like second flush, but also carried aromatic and flavor notes that are similar to a classic spring first flush.

The Eco-Cha Tea Club is mostly about finding an unusually distinct batch of tea that is not generally available on the market, we also make an effort to maintain variability in the monthly editions — with the goal of continually offering a different character of tea from month to month. Furthermore, we want to offer Taiwan's renowned specialty teas that are the best of their kind — in the world. Batch 82 is one of these representative Taiwan Oolong Teas: Li Shan High Mountain Oolong Tea.

Batch 79 of the Eco-Cha Tea Club is a Roasted Shan Lin Xi High Mountain Oolong Tea. As explained in the sourcing post, this batch is the roasted version of Eco-Cha's winter 2021 stock of Shan Lin Xi High Mountain Oolong. We were inspired to dedicate our reserve stock of Shan Lin Xi winter tea to the the Tea Club, upon learning that our friend achieved Top Category Award in the world's largest and most prestigious Oolong Tea competition! So we asked him to roast our stock just how he roasted his competition tea — which increased its value about 5 times of the original unroasted version!

Batch 79 of the Eco-Cha Tea Club is a Roasted Shan Lin Xi High Mountain Oolong Tea. It is the roasted version of our winter 2021 batch we offered in our store. Our friend from whom we sourced this tea submitted a single entry from this same harvest into the Lugu Farmers' Association Dong Ding Oolong Tea Competition and achieved Top Category Award (shown above). When our friend told us this exciting news, we asked him if we could hire his services to roast our reserve stock the same way he roasted his top award winning tea. So this month's edition of the Eco-Cha Tea Club is from the same harvest and roasted the same way as the tea that ranked within the top 2% out of over 5000 entries. 

Batch 76 of the Eco-Cha Tea Club is a Lalashan Light Roast High Mountain Oolong Tea, winter 2021 harvest. When we tasted the freshly picked and cured tea in the farmer's home, we appreciated the full-bodied, balanced character of it, although it was still slightly "muddled" due to the remaining moisture content in the leaves. This moisture was locked in the stem material — which was plentiful. So we decided to have the stems removed and do a light roasting to bring the leaves to what we perceived as their fullest potential.

Batch 76 of the Eco-Cha Tea Club is a first for us, in the sense that we have never sourced tea from the Lalashan region before. Lalashan is the northernmost high elevation tea growing area on the island of Taiwan, and has a significantly colder and usually wetter climate than all other regions. Snowfall on Taiwan's High Mountain Tea farms is a rare occasion. In fact, only a small portion of Taiwan tea farms have ever seen snow. We share this image to represent the location and climate in the Lalashan that sets it apart. The photo above was taken in 2016.

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.

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.

Batch 72 of the Eco-Cha Tea Club is a Lugu Competition Dong Ding Oolong Tea. This tea type is one of the top three most famous Taiwan Teas and was prepared for one of the largest and most prestigious Oolong Tea competitions in the world. So we thought it's representing as a specialty Taiwanese Tea!

The Lugu competition happens twice a year, in spring and in winter.  He prepares dozens of batches of tea for this competition. It's a significant part of his work as a tea merchant. Preparation involves procuring the tea, roasting it repeatedly, and removing the stems and discolored leaves. The roasting is extremely time consuming. He and his wife work around the clock for weeks on end to roast their tea for this competition.

The summer batch is noticeably less oxidized than the spring batch, and has maintained its fresh green character that Lishan tea is most renowned for. The leaves were sufficiently oxidized in order to remove the green grassy character that is inherently in the leaves. This is what distinguishes Oolong from Green Tea. Just a minimal amount of oxidation resulting from gently shuffling the leaves intermittently over long periods of wilting transforms the chemical compounds in the leaves, offering a more complex and substantial flavor profile. This batch of tea offers a buttery, savory aroma — especially upon moistening the leaves, but also throughout subsequent brews. The flavor profile is mildly sweet fresh cream, with herbal notes. The finish is clean, soft, yet lingering and subtly heady, with floral undertones.