What is your favorite tea and why?

[HK]

@bdog

The tin pictured in the original post looks pretty generic, can’t see anything on there specific to any farm/area of li shan.

I’m enjoying some nantou wu long at the moment. I’ve got a shop near me full of the stuff. Got chatting to the guy the other day, he started feeding me all the tired old sales lines about the higher the elevation, the better. Mostly BS afaic. I just get the basic stuff, i.e. no marketed high elevation. By my research it is a little more environmentally friendly. Taiwan tea’s dirty little secret: the high mountain farms reak havoc on other farms down the mountain.

Imported English teas when I feel like something punchy. So Carrefour doesn’t have pg tips @Firefighter? I’m happy enough with Typhoo.

Masala tea from Trinity too :

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Hope this helps.

[Gain]

Black

[BHL4life]

matcha, jasmine green tea, wu long tea and hong kong milk tea.

[rooftopclown]

Long Island Ice Tea is very pleasant too.

[crusher]

@Brianjones

In Ireland we have two local favourites brands, Barry’s and Lyons. Similar to English breakfast tea being very strong , those blacks teas are mostly grown in Kenya. I prefer lighter fresher black tea now. Anyway I like a good Assam too.

Assam is a touch too colonial for you

[Explant]

If buying it to make at hime: organic. Reason: dont like drinking chemicals used to kill insects. Haha. But love the dark teas grown in taiwan. Assam, oolong and chig cha in that order which are all grown here in both organic and not organic farms.

Huge fan of masala tea with assam. Drink it daily. But recipes vary a lot so to each their own!

[tigerninjaman]

@Brianjones

Taichung where the best tea shops and tea culture exists in Taiwan

Any particular recommendations? Tea is a big part of the reason I came to Taiwan but so far I’ve only been able to find good teas in Yuchi, Alishan, or Maokong.

Personally, I love white tea the most, especially aged. Nothing quite like it to help me relax. The best Taiwanese tea I’ve had, though, is a black tea I got from Maokong (張迺妙紅茶) though I also have a great black tea from Alishan.

[Brianjones]

There used to be a lot of beautiful teashops but gradually most of them closed down so hard to recommend. The interesting thing about Taichung is that even the take away tea stores sell quite high quality fresh tea and a large variety too, they are quite different than Taipei, because they are independent smaller companies , sometimes they only sell in central Taiwan.
It seems that Taichung is the tea manufacturing and trading center of Taiwan to me, probably because of its closer proximity to Nantou and Alishan and Miaoli.

Its no surprise that bubble tea was invented in Taichung. I don’t know any other place anywhere that has such a great tea culture. I’m not a connoisseur of fine teas, it’s more I learned how to differentiate teas by taste simply by drinking them everyday there.