Black Teas

Displaying 1 to 3 (of 3 products)

Product Name	Price-	Weight
'Honey' Hon Cha	£29.00	100g
Without a doubt, my favourite black tea. It is delicious without milk but more so with! This hand picked tea is also processed skilfully by hand to produce its elegant spiral shape. Just 500kgs are made a year due to the fact it is made from leaves that have been bitten by tiny insects. This only happens for a couple of weeks in the early summer. It is the damage done to the leaf and the secretions from the leaf to repair itself that give the tea its sweet, honeylike flavour. This Gold Medal winning batch is just 5kgs in total. In common with all the best Taiwan teas, this has a flavour and fragrance that cannot be compared to teas from anywhere else. Its very complexity is what makes it elude description! Among the myriad notes that our customers have used are commonly, honey, peach skin, nectarine, dark chocolate, of course honey and perhaps the most specific "the fragrance of the drying grasses and wild flowers found on the highest Alpine slopes of Switzerland". These grasses are considered sacred by the farmers and are hand cut and raked. This herbal and flower mix is perhaps a good way of imagining either of these special experiences. This tea is grown in the beautiful Shansia area of Taiwan’s Taipei county where the plants of course cannot be sprayed with insecticide. It is made using the Chin Shin Gan Tze varietal of tea bush. There are two ways to appreciate this tea depending on whether you want to have milk or not. If you use milk allow 3g or a good heaped teaspoon per person and brew for 5-6 minutes. It is worth the wait! If taking black, brew in the Chinese style with 2g of tea, three minute infusion time but the leaves can be brewed 3-4 times. Both ways are great with sugar.
'Buddha's Hand' Fo Shou Hon Cha	£28.00	100g
This hand picked tea is processed skilfully by hand to produce its elegant shape. Just a 20kg batch was made of this delicious tea, one of my real favourites, on a farm on the Mirror Mountain of Taiwan. It is the best batch of this tea I have ever tasted. It has a strong red grape aroma in the dry leaves with a raisin like flavour in the cup that also carries subtle notes of bergamot and mint. It is grown on a strain of bush called Fo Shou or ‘Buddha’s Hand’. It has very large leaves with distinct veins, like palm lines. This strain comes originally from the Wuyi Mountain in China. It has been rediscovered and planted by a farmer called Mr Zhuang, who has combined the natural characteristics of the strain, the fertile soil in his garden and 20 years of experimentation to create a unique flavoured tea. There are two ways to appreciate its sweet, almost creamy flavour and complex aroma, depending on whether you want to have milk or not. If you use milk allow 1.5g and brew for 8 minutes! It is worth the wait! If taking black use 1g and brew for just two minutes. It can also be made in the Chinese Gong Fu or 'Kung Fu' style, shorter infusion times but the leaves can be brewed 3-4 times. It is also great with sugar.
'Ruby' from Sun Moon Lake	£26.00	100g
This prizewinning tea from Taiwan was as a result of a tea cultivar breeding scheme started over fifty years ago. I have to say it has the most complex flavour I have come across in a black tea and has become my favourite type. It is a broad leaf tea cultivar yielding a tea infusion with a natural cinnamonic fragrance and a rich, malty flavour. The source of this enchanting fragrance and flavour was from its female parent, the Taiwan wild mountain tea from Sun Moon Lake. The male parent was that of a Burmese cultivar intoduced by the Japanese during the war. The TRES spent over 50 years to accomplish the breeding program and release this cultivar. 'Ruby', as it is known, is praised by black tea experts for its unique "Taiwan fragrance", belonging to this extremely special tea cultivar, distinct among the thousands of black tea strains in the world. Its special fragrance lingers and leaves you unable to forget its aroma and flavour for a very long time. In the year of 2003, the TRES celebrated its centennial anniversary and chose 'Ruby' as a common name through a vote. There are two ways to appreciate this tea depending on whether you want to have milk or not. If you use milk allow 3g or a good heaped teaspoon per person and brew for 5 minutes. It is worth the wait! If taking black, brew in the Chinese style with 2g of tea, three minute infusion time but the leaves can be brewed 3-4 times. Both ways are great with sugar.

Displaying 1 to 3 (of 3 products)

Sample packet is available where this image is shown.