Explore the Rich & Earthy Collection by Blue Willow Tea. These hand-selected teas offer a robust cup with flavor notes of wood, earth, and toast, perfect for those who savor deep, comforting brews.
$ 30.00
We are so pleased to share this new tea with you. Harvested in the winter on Phoenix Mountain, this black tea is made from Mi Lan Xiang Oolong cultivars. Winter harvested teas grow slower in the limited sunlight, soaking up more minerals from the soil as they grow and often developing sweeter notes. The resulting flavor is unique and intense. The warm leaf offers notes of baked plum pie and a hint of citrus peel. Even with short steeps the tea is full bodied and has a nourishing intensity that settles deep in your throat. When allowed to steep longer, the leaves emanate distinctive chocolate flavors that wash over your senses like velvet.
Process: Organic
Harvest: Winter, 2023
Origin: Guangdong, China
$ 26.00
This is a new edition we were so excited to bring home from our 2023 Japan trip. Grown from the Ujimidori cultivar in Wazuka, this crafted on a woman-owned, organic family tea farm by Teruko Azuma.
Teruko has been pushing the boundaries of what Japanese teas can do, producing exquisite white teas, oolongs, black teas, and experimenting with innovative processing methods. This oolong is no different. The leaves are mid-high oxidized, heated, and then roasted in her hojicha roaster. The result is a tea with similar characteristics as Phoenix Mountain red teas: chocolately, fruity, nutty and toasty. The warm notes of roasted cedar fill the mouth, with a hint of plum-like fruit and lingering burnt sugar sweetness. We like to steep this in a gaiwan with short, repeated steeps, but it also does well with longer steeps without becoming bitter.
Process: Organic
Origin: Uji, Japan
Harvest: 2023
$ 58.00
We are so happy to have a small amount of this spectacular tea to share with you. Hand-crafted by Yong Hao, who has been producing award-winning tea on Chi Lai Mountain for many years. This Qing Xin cultivar is expertly roasted over charcoal and rolled several times to achieve its shape. The aroma offers notes of baked yams and burnt sugar, with essences of warm cedar. Steeped, the tea is soft but complex. The toasty notes of the firing are at the forefront and give way to a sweetly satisfying cup with honeysuckle hints. Over time, the roast flavor will settle and reveal more flavors, which we are so excited to witness. This tea is grown with organic fertilizers and tested to assure cleanliness.
Harvest: Spring, 2023
Origin: Nantou, Taiwan
$ 88.00
We are honored to offer you this tea. These 200g cakes are a community effort to interlace feral and old growth tea from around the village and mountains of Mangjing. The leaves were plucked and fermented in 2016 and have since developed into an incredible tea which we had pressed in 2023. The aroma is thick and earthen, yielding to a deep chocolate liquor with an incredible velvety mouthfeel. Each sip leaves traces of cacao, berries and peat all the way down to your stomach, where it fosters an internal warmth and grounding energy.
The village of Mangjing is situated in the ancient tea-producing Jingmai Mountain range and is home to the Bee Immortal Tree, central to the village's agricultural calendar. The immense banyan tree is draped in dozens of beehives, which are closely watched throughout the year. When the majority of bees return in the spring, it is the signal to begin plucking the tea trees.
This tea is a decadent shou cha that can be steeped all day long and still present new flavors. The roots of these trees tap into so many layers of minerals in the rich soil, that each steep unveils new depth and complexities.