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It was quite the tea cupping when we visited our source of both Alishan and Li Shan High Mountain Oolong to taste the recent fall harvest. We cupped three different types of tea overall, drinking tea for about three hours straight! But for now, we'll focus on Alishan High Mountain Oolong Tea — fall harvest.

What's the difference between an Oolong tea that's been roasted for over three weeks versus one roasted over three years? We did a taste test of two of our roasted Taiwanese teas to find out! Continue reading to find out what we discovered!

Taiwan High Mountain Oolong Teas are typically harvested 3 or 4 times a year. Between the most popular spring and winter harvests, there are usually summer and/or fall crops. In recent years, we've been dedicated to sourcing these "in between" harvests as much as possible. We do this for two reasons.

Our summer 2022 batch of Alishan High Mountain Jin Xuan Oolong is an exemplary representative of this category of Taiwan Tea! It is lightly oxidized, offering pronounced milky/buttery notes which the Jin Xuan cultivar is famous for. Given the weather patterns through the early spring growing season compared with the late spring growing season — the second flush offers a more classic Alishan Jin Xuan flavor profile.

Given the fact that Tie Guan Yin Oolong Tea entails the most extensive processing methods, offering a rich, bold, and complex character — we've found that letting a newly made batch settle for a few months allows it to achieve optimal results. So, we only just now offering our winter 2021 batch. And just for fun, we did a cupping together with our winter 2018 and our spring 2020 past batches

Taiwan many kinds of tea but have you ever wondered what's the most popular? Well, we've compiled an overview of our top 5 best selling Taiwan Teas of 2021 to offer some perspective on the popular names in Taiwan Tea.

Taiwan's Tea Research and Extension Station has produced dozens of hybrid tea cultivars. But there are three hybrid cultivars created in Taiwan which are by far the most popular. These are Jin Xuan (Tai Cha #12), Tsui Yu (Tai Cha #13), and Four Seasons Spring.

We just sourced our winter batches of Alishan High Mountain Oolong and Alishan High Mountain Jin Xuan Oolong, and they are on the shelf now! We decided to do a side by side tasting of these two winter teas to experience how they differ from each other — particularly the two batches that we just procured. We've gradually realized how much more significantly oxidized winter crops of High Mountain Oolong are in recent years compared with decades ago. Especially from our sources of Alishan and Shan Lin Xi High Mountain Tea. There are two main reasons for this.

This year's second crop of Alishan High Mountain Jin Xuan Oolong began to be harvested last week, before rains that lasted several days. Then resumed earlier this week. We first visited our primary source of Alishan High Mountain Tea to taste their first two days of summer harvest. 

Our Hong Oolong Tea comes from Meishan Township, Chiayi County, Taiwan. Meishan is the northeastern corner of the Alishan tea producing region, and in our perception, it generally offers the best Alishan Tea. So, even though Hong Oolong is not commonly made in this region, Eco-Cha (at long last!) has chosen this source for specific reasons.

We took this photo last spring when we slept out at this spot in order to catch the early morning harvest. It gives you a sense of the environment and the extent of farm development in this area of the Alishan High Mountain Tea producing region. It is one of the reasons we've chosen this farm as our source. This area was already developed as a rural farming community before the onset of modern tea production in Taiwan. The family farms were simply repurposed to grow tea when High Mountain Tea became popular. So, the development of tea production in this area has had less environmental impact than most other High Mountain Tea producing regions in Taiwan.

This batch of Alishan High Mountain Jin Xuan Oolong summer 2020 harvest has a very pronounced buttery character. Starting with the leaves put into the pre-heated tea judging cup, they exuded a pronounced buttered toast/popcorn aroma. But the flavor profile is replete with an uncanny buttered popcorn note, it's almost unbelievable! How can tea leaves do this?! It's not only buttered popcorn either! There are distinct floral and vegetal notes that balance out the incredulous and delicious buttered popcorn flavor. OK, enough repetitive description! Click here to get your share.