5-time Charcoal Roasted High Mountain Oolong
Get ready for the roastiness!
Made with top-quality leaves from Dong Ding Mountain in Taiwan, these leaves are roasted five sessions over longan wood charcoal to achieve a bold flavor and heavy scent similar to coffee. Yet even so, the tea flavor shines through: crisp, clean, and sweet.
Each roasting session takes eight hours, and needs careful observation to make sure the leaves do not burn. Given the long roast time - and that the leaves need to rest between roasts - making a small batch of this tea takes a full month.
If you're a diehard oolong fan looking for something you haven't tried before, this is a good choice!
High Mountain Teas
This tea comes from high altitude mountains in Taiwan, where the altitude's effects on weather, sunlight, and fog create cleaner, crisper tasting teas.
I really had a strong reaction when I got the first smell of this tea's first steep - it smelled like coffee and cigars, and I expected that I might taste a chalky, ashy flavor, but nothing could be farther from the truth.
This is a tea guy's tea, something that I hadn't tried before this trip to Taiwan. I really had no idea what everyone will make of it, but I knew that if I took a sample home, I would be drinking it several times a month as a curveball tea, something a bit different from the normal, and I knew that enough tea drinkers would be like me and want to try some as well.
This tea is very labor intensive to make, and so is much more expensive than the other teas in the series. In our sampler, we only give people 10 grams. My thinking is that it's worth a try for everyone, and the people who like it will be willing to pay to get more of it!
Charcoal Roasting: A Disappearing Tradition
Me and Uncle Liu, who is showing off a HEFTY BOI piece of longan wood charcoal
Most roasted oolong tea is roasted in giant electric ovens, which aim to slowly remove moisture from the leaves, increasing its shelf life and improving flavor.
These electric roasters have almost completely replaced the traditional charcoal-roasting method, which involves using charcoal made from longan trees, which burns more evenly than other woods.
Uncle Liu, our roaster and one of the few remaining charcoal roasters in Taiwan, showed me how he carefully modulated the heat of the coals by burying them under ash - by adding and removing ash, the heat can be both controlled and evenly distributed.
Each roasting session takes eight hours under supervision from highly skilled roasters. The resulting tea is truly excellent, and the skill of the roaster can be seen in how the original flavor of the tea shines through the roastiness and is not overwhelmed by the smoky, nutty flavors.
OUR TEA PEOPLE
We will be working directly with Jayme and Uncle Liu, a third-generation tea family with farms in Dong Ding and Qilai Mountain!
Jayme and I at her family's tea farm on Dong Ding Shan. Jayme's family's teas are featured in Michelin Star restaurants across Europe.
Uncle Liu is one of the last people in all of Taiwan who still does traditional charcoal roasting, using only pure Longan tree charcoal to make small batches of maximum 6 kg at a time.
VALUE AND QUALITY
Want the best value? This tea comes in 100g and 200g sizes - check the drop-down menu above!
Jesse's Teahouse started because Jesse realized the quality and value of the tea directly from the tea markets and mountains in Asia was so much higher than what could be easily found in the States -- and around the world.
Jesse contacted his tea friends, they shipped their best teas to him, and he sends them to you. That's it!
These teas are high quality and can be re-steeped multiple times! Each serving makes between 4-8 cups of tea, so at around $.50 a cup, you get top quality Chinese teas at a price that you can enjoy every day.
NOT JUST TEA, TEA CULTURE
Jesse believes the key to making good tea is to help his Chinese tea friends share not just their best teas, but the best ways to make the teas.
That's why each box comes also comes with info that tells you:
- Tea Origin
- Steep Temperature
- Steep Time
- Directions for both teapot steeping and gaiwan steeping
Don't Forget Your Tea Pets!
In Chinese Gongfu Tea Tradition, Tea Pets accompany you at teatime and you "raise" them by feeding them tea! Check out the tea pets at the bottom of this page.
