The tea improvement institute in Taiwan is over a hundred years old, and they have had major successes over the last few decades introducing new types of oolong such as Red Oolong.
You can get oolong tea in Taiwan that smells roast malty chocolatey, sweet like honey , floral, lychee , truffley or even citrusey. You can push the flavour profile of pure tea a lot more than coffee.
All 100% pure tea. NO additives. Its all in the different varieties of Camelia Sinensis and Camelia Assamica and how they process them. Nothing I like better than sticking my nose in a fresh batch and smelling it (could be a bit weird eh ).
China also has some wonderful teas obviously, however I believe Taiwan has the most innovation and experimentation, so much so that processors from Taiiwan are often paid to go to Japan and China to improve their tea processing methods. A lot of the quality is due to hand picking the finest tea leaves. If that disappears quality will drop dramatically.
Yep all the tea processors are really concerned as they should be.
I’m going to open my last bag of Nantou wild white tea now (it just looks like a bunch of autumn leaves), but tastes incredible. Most people would not be able to identify it as tea from how it looks but its amongst the top tea you could hope to drink lol.
Ya, there a few plantations near us that closedthese years because everyone is fighting over the few remaining workers. They just said F it. Most i s ee bow use tem to hand cut then mechanized to roll through and get everything else for cheaper markets. Fun to watch.
Those white teas are an interesting thing. Not my style personally. I love the the ones they let bugs work on. Mixiang? Forgot the name.
Splatter house, the work of the aunties liquid shatting all over the place. Literally. They have far less manners and respect than the tea houses lol.
Every tea growing area has farmers and pricessirs selling directly. I like to sometimes stay at their farmsteads and buy then. Another way is to check on Facebook, search on there you will find they have facebook pages.
.search 瑞豐。梨山 ， 三峽， 梅山， 花蓮, 日月潭。and the tea you like.
White tea or mixiang hong cha is getting more popular now. They tend to make that now in the Summer time.
Of course you can try to find in many tea stores sell this too.
In the Eastern EU, will try to visit a some tea shops, it seems a lot more green tea than I expected, have to see if any tea from Taiwan (might even try bubble tea shops)
green is just so much easier to process. Brian, correct me if i am wrong. But i feel its somewhat like comparing grape juice to a fine wine. lots goes into the fermenting and processing… i may be talking out my ass, but from the places i have visited the process seems sooooo much easier for green. not to take away from the farming aspect and that work.
Yes some kinds of green tea require minimal work. But there’s all kinds of green teas too. Oolong is the most complex to make and maybe dongfang meiren to get right.
Taiwan could make matcha teas (and does make them but I never drank a good one) but they would need to change their farming and manufacturing processes, they add a load of nitrogen to create the rapid light green shoot growth and I think they may shade the plants? They also have specialised machinery to powderise the tea just right (I often bought Taiwan and Japanese matcha…the Japanese make their matcha into an extemely fine powder). Japanese tea farms are highly automated and they very rarely do hand picking, quite different than many in Taiwan.
Taiwan I guess if some time investment could do better matcha as seems be growing market. Had some good ones in Finland, Japanese style but now many variations.
I am curious to know more about the matcha possibilities here. When we were visiting farms in Japan, they would place a sheet and pile on leaves on the top then do something with fertilizers. I forgot what.
I wonder more about this and if it can be done here given the hotter/wetter environment. More wondering about fungal and bacterial issues.
for now still enough old folks to hand pick in many areas it seems. They spew liquid shit all over my lands (and everyone esles) on the weekly the selfish so and so’s!. farms are buying machines anyway, usually doing a first pass by hand then the ultimate pass by machine to get the bulk and maintain shape. the hand pickers will certainly die off (the ones in my area are all in the 60~70 year old range unless foreign, 100% female). frankly we need to allow immigrants to come setup shop normally to allow this industry to thrive going forward. seems the generation that mostly appreciates the hand picked teas is dieing off as well, so maybe it’s not worth saving to some. I do enjoy a cup of love. not a huge tea fan, but always enjoy consuming something that took passion and effort to make it slightly better than the easy and fast. same for food. but tea is cheap, even the fancy ones. given the quantity needed per day. a fun past time with loads of history and stories to shoot around. I enjoy reading about you guys doing the tea rounds, very fascinating.
They just can’t get the pickers it’s not that the tea has low value, handpicked tea is massively better than the machine cut stuff . Even bands of illegal tea pickers charge premium prices.
Sure. I was alluding to market for such teas are largely the same age group that is still employed to hand pick it probably not literally, but seems so generally.
still see lots of hand pickers though. but they are all old. if they dont allow some.immigrants in, I doubt the young taiwanese are all that keen. it’s a paycheck, but it’s not great money and destroys your back!
).
the selfish so and so’s!. farms are buying machines anyway, usually doing a first pass by hand then the ultimate pass by machine to get the bulk and maintain shape. the hand pickers will certainly die off (the ones in my area are all in the 60~70 year old range unless foreign, 100% female). frankly we need to allow immigrants to come setup shop normally to allow this industry to thrive going forward. seems the generation that mostly appreciates the hand picked teas is dieing off as well, so maybe it’s not worth saving to some. I do enjoy a cup of love. not a huge tea fan, but always enjoy consuming something that took passion and effort to make it slightly better than the easy and fast. same for food. but tea is cheap, even the fancy ones. given the quantity needed per day. a fun past time with loads of history and stories to shoot around. I enjoy reading about you guys doing the tea rounds, very fascinating.
probably not literally, but seems so generally.