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Dong Ding Oolong Tea Country is the biggest hub of Taiwan tea culture. Soon after the KMT took control of Taiwan, the area on and around Dong Ding Mountain was determined to be the best location to develop tea cultivation.

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

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.

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.

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!

We taste tested our three new batches of winter High Mountain Oolong Tea -- Shan Lin Xi, Alishan, and Li Shan. We can see the difference in the oxidation levels of the tea leaves in the coloration of the brewed tea. We can see a higher degree of oxidation in the Shan Lin Xi and less oxidation as we move to the Li Shan.

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.

The tea name Tie Guan Yin Oolong can represent different things. First, it is the name of a tea tree cultivar that originates from Anxi Province in China. This cultivar was brought to Taiwan generations ago, and continues to be popular, although less commonly found than other tea strains. Since Eco-Cha is an exclusive purveyor of specialty Taiwan Tea, we represent this name as a unique processing method that was developed in Muzha, Taipei over 50 years ago.

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.

he climate in the Lishan region is strikingly different from other tea producing regions. At 2000m elevation, and a valley situated in a direction that allows the north-easterly wind patterns to offer drastic diurnal temperature variations — tea leaves produced here are of a different caliber. We are thrilled to be sharing a batch of tea from the area that really is most impressive in terms of its "high mountain" character!

Taiwan's Tea Research and Extension Service (TRES) recently hosted a seminar that showcased the tea making skills of 15 champion prize winning tea masters from throughout Taiwan. Each shared his skill in making a particular type of tea. Here we give a behind-the-scenes look at what went down at this one of a kind event.