News

We are very excited to announce that we have a very small amount of top award-winning competition tea to share, and it happens to be our personal favorite tea type and locale: Dong Ding Oolong from Yonglong/Fenghuang Community in Lugu. This recent winter batch of tea was entered into the locals-only competition in the historical tea producing villages on and around Dong Ding Mountain.

This father and son team who manage their farm and process their harvests together have both won first prize in their local tea competition within the last ten years. This is an exclusive competition that only residents of the historical Dong Ding Oolong tea producing villages of Fenghuang, Yonglong, and Zhangya on Dong Ding Mountain are eligible to enter. This is home to the most concentrated population of traditional tea artisans in Taiwan, and very likely in the world.

In our previous post, we gave a brief of description Batch #3, along with its source, and how this tea is a perfect match in terms of what Eco-Cha aspires to promote in our involvement with the local specialty tea industry here in Taiwan. So now we just want to talk about the tea itself, and how we determine this batch to be a unique find, and why it qualifies as our next choice for the Eco-Cha Tea Club.

We recently received this question from Eco-Cha Monthly Tea Club member Paul in Norway:

For the tea of the month you said "integrating traditional Tieguanyin oxidation methods with Dong Ding roasting skills." I was wondering if you could describe this process in more detail? 

We thought it worthwhile to share our response to this question with all of the Tea Club members as well as our readership in general for your reference.

I showed up at the tea factory for the first batch of winter tea harvest being supervised by some of the most skilled professionals I know. Both the manager of the farm and the manager of the processing are tea judges in the world's largest Oolong Tea competition, and they are both friends of mine. I haven't tasted the finished product, but I did take home a handful of semi-dried leaves from the factory that night and brewed it the next day, about 24 hours after the leaves were picked. It was really floral, balanced and fresh tasting. I'll see what I can do to get at least a small amount of this batch, as I personally already find it special.

My friend ended up sharing a small amount of the remainder of this award winning tea that proved to be quite delicious as it transformed in quality over several brews. I proudly took it across the globe to share with a friend in Los Angeles who has appreciated the Dong Ding Oolong that we have shared with him for over a decade.

Roads were blocked as a result of landslides in many mountainous areas of Taiwan for weeks and months following Typhoon Morakot. This meant that the tea farms on the other side of these landslides were left unmanaged until the roads were opened.