20 years Taiwan East Coast Red tea

Last week, I arrived at 5:40 AM at the Banciao train station. Destination: RuiSui, a town located south of Hualien. 20 years ago, a tea farmer from there shocked Taiwanese tea producers by winning the 2006 International Tea Competition held in Taiwan with a red tea! How could a red tea win the first prize on the island better known for high mountain Oolong, roasted Dong Ding and Baozhong teas? And how could a farmer from the East Coast win, a region with little tea culture, better known for its rice and aborigines?

It was a mixture of luck, hard work, experiments and the help of nature.

View of the Pacific Ocean from the train

Luck.

In 2005, the red tea Jin Jun Mei was invented in TongMu village in Fujian, China. This tea is a tippy lapsang souchong without the pine-smoking. It quickly became the most expensive red tea and helped spur new interest for high quality red teas.    

View of the Pacific Ocean from the train

Hard work.

My farmer had experience growing tea in Taiwan's tea regions in the West of the island. When he moved to Hualien, he started things from scratch. It's much more difficult to do when all your suppliers are on the other side of the island, 6 to 10 hours away. 30 years ago, the transportation wasn't as fast as today. He also had to train local pickers...

View of the Pacific Ocean from the train

Experiments.

At first, he experimented with Da Pang cultivar and Oriental Beauty, just like in HsinChu. He quickly found out that this cultivar wasn't suited for the East Coast soil. He tried all kinds of tea cultivars and production methods. He's still making flower scented Baozhong, fresh rolled Oolong, but mostly red tea. 

The tropic of Cancer marker

Nature's help.

His experimentation with Oriental Beauty Oolong was very important, because it showed the farmer that the little jassids (jacobiasca formosana paoli) are plenty in his fields if he's not using pesticides. So he persisted on the organic path and when he was making red tea with Da Yeh Oolong, the bites of the little jassids created that distinctive, natural honey scent that feels like a miracle. What incredible flavors for a red tea!

Jinxuan plantation

The farmer has continued to test different cultivars with his red tea process. Surprisingly, Jinxuan is yielding good results, despite the fact that this cultivar was originally created for the light oxidation process. Jinxuan is quite resistant and well suited for organic growing methods, so it's not a total surprise... Jinxuan grows quite evenly and is therefore also suited for machine or hand harvest.

Da Yeh Oolong plantation

The Da Yeh Oolong cultivar grows less evenly as you may observe from the 2 pictures above. Here, manual harvesting is a necessity. 

The leaves don't grow very tall in October. This is a high quality season and pickers are not paid for quantity, but for quality (and by the day). This means that the pickers are all elderly local women. This is different from the high mountains. There, pickers are mostly foreign and young.

These old ladies work slowly and softly. The delicate picking of the leaves by hand helps with the smoothness and sweetness of the brew.  

The fall weather feels almost like late spring on the East Coast! The weather is neither too cold, not too hot. The leaves grow slowly as they get plenty of sunshine in the morning. 

Our little green jassids prefer this kind of weather. Like in Hsin Chu, they are most plentiful when the weather is neither too cold, nor too hot. It was relatively easy to find some and take their pictures. See how small they are compared to my fingers! 

Recently, a tea friend from Pittsburgh told me that some of his friends are a little bit squeezy when they hear that some leaves are bug bitten... He reassures them that tea goes through temperatures of close to 200 degrees Celsius during the kill green. This would pasteurize the leaves and get rid of the bugs. Their contribution happens on the tea field: biting the buds triggers a defense mechanism by the plant and this gives the tea its special honey flavors.

I also saw lots of tea flowers, as it's the seed season for the tea trees....

 Below, enjoy a silent drone video of the view of these plantations in RuiSui!

20 years later, does this tea still amaze?

2026 fall Imperial Red Da Yeh

Thanks to this trip and tasting over 30 different batches of jassid bitten reds, I have selected 3 grades from this farmer. The most 'honey fragrant' is the Imperial Red. It has the most golden tips and the scents are perfume grade.

This is a tea for the Christmas season! It's naturally sweet and mellow and comes with such intense scents!

The color is beautiful and has a great transparency. 

There is also a top version and this regular version that I supply to my parents for their breafast tea. They love to start their day with the natural sweet honey flavors from Taiwan's East Coast! 

Taiwan's best teas have a feminine character!