Hello tea lovers! This year, our Meifeng and Farm Edge teas are the final two batches of spring tea we’ve harvested. For everyone waiting on Dayuling, Biluxi, Songmao, and Xinjiyang, we want to sincerely apologize—we won’t be stocking them this year, so please don’t wait.
First, I want to emphasize that what follows is simply what the store manager observed, and doesn’t represent every single tea garden.
It rained for seven straight days from May 11th to 17th, disrupting the original harvest schedule. Tea gardens at elevations between 1,700 and 2,000 meters experienced the following issues:
1. Harvesting in the rain, commonly known as “rain-picked tea.”
2. Tea meant to be harvested on the 11th and 12th was delayed until the 18th, turning into overgrown, mature leaves. As you can see below, the tea leaves are simply too old:
3. Seven days’ worth of tea got crammed into the harvest window between the 18th and 21st. Too much tea leaves harvested at once severely impacted the processing quality.
When I went up to the mountains on May 18th and 19th, I found these issues in many tea gardens. Points two and three were particularly severe—overgrown tea is bland and lacks flavor, and the sharp drop in quality caused by rushed processing is even more obvious.
This year, for ultra-high-mountain teas, we are only carrying two selections: Meifeng and Farm Edge. Both feature tender leaves and come from tea owners with their “own tea factory” and “dedicated tea-making team.” Smaller tea gardens without their own facilities and teams had a really tough time this year. Even large factories struggled to keep up with their own workloads, making it nearly impossible to look after the quality of smaller tea producers.
If you’re looking to buy high mountain tea this year, we recommend prioritizing batches harvested between May 6th and 12th, as the harvesting and processing conditions were much better. For teas harvested between the 18th and 21st, be sure to ask about the condition of the leaves. To reiterate, these are simply the observations of the store manager and don’t apply to every single tea garden out there.