Oriental Beauty

東方美人

Harvest
June 2024

Origin
E'mei, Hsinchu, Taiwan

This Oriental Beauty, from Beipu, is the Spring 2024 harvest, and has everything we could want and expect from a tea of this quality: delicate auburn leaves that smell sweet and reanimate quickly in water; a silky, round mouthfeel with minty floral notes that activate the palate; and lingering tropical fruit notes that leave the taste of water lily in their wake. The total experience recalls junmai sake, or even Monet’s Water Lilies, as it comes across as an elegant, affective ode to wateriness itself.

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Oriental Beauty is a tea that occupies a category of its own. It is well known as a rare and precious tea, often commanding the highest prices of all teas from Taiwan. 

There are a few reasons why Oriental Beauty carries both this value and reputation.

Firstly, it is entirely made from leaves that are bitten by a small fly. The bite from the fly is what begins this oolong’s process of oxidation, allowing it to happen while the leaves are still on the tree! We can attribute Oriental Beauty’s very unique and sweet characteristics to this little fly.

Secondly, like all highly prized tea, terroir is extremely important to Oriental Beauty. True Oriental Beauty will only come from one of two small villages, Beipu and E’mei. of Hsin Chu County. These two villages combined have an area of 90 km², (to put that in perspective, the city of Vancouver is 114 km²!)

Lastly, Oriental Beauty is extremely labour intensive to harvest and craft. The highest grades are made exclusively of the smallest and youngest one-bud-one-leaf. These  tender leaves are very hard to pick. In one full day of harvesting, a skilled tea picker will only collect between 75 and 100 grams of fresh leaves. Thus, it takes 8 to 10 skilled tea pickers an entire day to collect enough leaves to make 500 grams of Oriental Beauty. As you can quickly calculate, the labour costs for Oriental Beauty are amongst the highest of all teas in the world. 

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Brewing guide