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New Teas at Leaves of Cha; Six Pack Sampler Sale
Jade Earrings handcrafted White Tea
Description:
This is a spectacular hand-rolled tea from Yunnan that is a delight to behold and to drink. Be sure to watch the symmetrical “earrings” slowly unfurl in the water as you infuse the tea. I call this tea “Jade Nautilus”. The rings remind me of the marine creature as they sink slowly unfurling to join the rest of the writhing tea at the bottom. I add the tea to the water instead of the other way around so I can really enjoy them dropping through the water. The time-consuming hand rolling requires a high level of skill but the results are stunning.
Provenance:
- Origin: Mojiang Town, Simao Prefecture, Yunnan
- Grower/Teamaster: Pu Hong Li
- Elevation: 1500 meters
- Harvest Date: Autumn 2015
- Cultivar: Yun Kang #100
- Cultivation: Natural (Organic, no certification)
- Plucking Standard: Pure bud pluck
- Processing Notes: Hand-rolled with great care into symmetrical hoops, or “earrings”
- Nickname: Jin Si Hong (as it is made from Jinggu Golden strands, so literally “Strands of Gold”); Jade Nautilus
You can find this tea in the Featured Products section of the home page or under White Tea.
Sentoya Momiji
Description:
Japan is renowned for their high-quality and delicious green teas. Black tea, on the other hand, is fairly uncommon. This one was inspired by Ayumi Kinezuka’s visits to Sri Lanka. But instead of the robust maltiness she tasted in the teas typically made there, her tea is crafted to be a smooth, drinkable, and essentially Japanese.
This unique tea is from the small, completely organic Kinezuka farm in Shizuoka. Their natural growing practices are an anomaly in the midst of Japan’s typically heavy use of chemicals in their industrialized tea industry
Provenance:
- Origin: Nakayama Village in Fujieda, Shizuoka, Japan
- Grower/Teamaster: Kinezuka Family/Ayumi Kinezuka
- Elevation: 350m (1150ft)
- Harvest Date: Spring 2013
- Cultivar: Yabukita
- Cultivation: Natural (Organic, no cert.) Toshiaki Kinezuka started farming with all-natural methods back in 1976, so the farm has been grown with organic practices for 38 years.
- Processing Notes: Fully oxidized tea using the same cultivar used widely for sencha and gyokuro
- Nickname: Sentoya Red Maple
You can find this tea in the Featured Products section of the home page or under Black Tea.
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Tea Sampler Six Pack
This is a great way to try out the delightful teas in the Leaves of Cha Tea Chest. Just pick out six teas that you would like to try in the 12g sample size pouches. The price of the six samples is discounted up to 56%, depending on the teas you select.
A great gift idea for the tea lover!
Welcome to Leaves of Cha, Part II
Welcome again to Leaves of Cha! Where you can find real tea made by real people that you can think about and thank whenever you take a sip of their delightful creations. That’s the whole point for me: connecting you, the drinker, with an artist, the teamaker or grower.
But where did all this come from? Why a tea business when you should be quietly working that high-paying corporate job for those last twenty years until retirement? Why now? And why tea?
I guess in some ways I’m one of the “…unloosed, the wandering souls who were willing to scrape their lives clean and start again elsewhere”, as Jessa Crispin puts it in her book The Dead Ladies Project. My unloosening came four years ago when I lost my high-paying corporate job to right-sizing, restructuring, and a flat industry and economy with not a lot to offer to a 50-year-old. So I scratched my head and dabbled around in a couple of things to help pay the rent. One of those things was helping a local tea company wholesale tea to restaurants, coffee houses, and tea shops. Being a lifelong tea drinker, this gave me a way of combining my sales skills with a food I love. Those two years of wholesaling gave me an insight into how the tea business worked. Especially the fact that if you are buying tea grown in quantity as a commodity, you are probably getting inferior tea, the growers and workers are not being paid sustainable wages, and more corporate farming practices (i.e., agrobusiness fertilizers and pesticides) are probably being used. See this excellent article on these issues, or download a copy of TeaforMePlease’s newsletter. Coupling that experience with educating myself on tea to a much deeper level than I ever had before as a drinker, I almost unknowingly started incubating my next big move. Leaves of Cha. Quality hand-made teas with known provenance.
Welcome to Leaves of Cha!
Welcome to Leaves of Cha! Where you can find real tea made by real people that you can think about and thank whenever you take a sip of their delightful creations. That’s the whole point for me: connecting you, the drinker, with an artist, the teamaker or grower.
So much of the tea we drink has no one’s name or face connected to it. It just has a corporation or company’s name attached to it. Much of the $40B+ tea industry is commodity tea and I suppose that tea doesn’t need a name attached to it. Sometimes you are just grabbing lunch at the closest spot near your job and want some iced tea. You can live with a corporate commodity brewed iced tea. Maybe you just shredded the top of Mammoth Mountain in a stormy whiteout and now you're coming into the lodge to defrost. Odds are your tea choices will be the same as what you could buy in the supermarket or big box discount store. And that’s OK, I suppose. Your main focus is warming up.
But the simplicity of tea is a huge attraction to me. Hot water. Tea. A cup. Maybe an infuser. That means I can drink Mr. Li’s handmade puerh in the lodge at Mammoth. I can drink the Zhu’s authentic West Lake Long Jing at my desk at work after I get back from lunch. Or cold-brew the Nath Brother’s handmade Assam while I’m off-the grid at camp in the woods of Oregon. If you’re a tea scientist or you’re just not ready to free-brew it yet, check out the Starter Kit to get you going. Everything you need to get started drinking tea with provenance. Know Your Tea! I hope you make some new friends here.
