The tea visitors are back!

Taiwan lifted its Covid quarantine mid October and now the international tea visitors are coming back! I'm glad and honored that I'm still one of the tea persons to meet for people who travel thousands of miles to this tea treasure island! This honor also obliges me to provide relevant and interesting information and teas to my guests. 

The very first one was Zac from the US. He's in the process of building a tea business and I tried my best to introduce him to Taiwan's most popular and affordable teas.

The #1 is the Si Ji Chun Oolong. Pictured above, we tasted its Dong Pian version (which is on sale right now!)

Then, below, we moved to its roasted version. He loved its complexity and strong flavors.

I also brewed some Oriental Beauty for him, because it's such an important tea in Taiwan. This one is from a single batch, harvested on Bastille Day, probably the tea I'm going to brew while watching the Soccer world cup final (FRA-ARG) this Sunday! 

It's such an important tea that I will study 4 different OBs during my online winter 2023 tea classes. I recommend you order this sampler if you wish to attend this class dedicated to high oxidized Oolongs and reds.

These online classes are for those who can't come to Taiwan, or wish to learn even more! 

My second visitor is Regis from France. (2 more visitors have already reserved some time with me after Christmas!)

I think it's the third class Régis has attended with me. This time, he wanted a class dedicated to Baozhong tea.. The characteristic of this tea is that it's not linked to a cultivar, but to a process. Besides, now that fresh high mountain Oolongs are popular, this process has also been expanded and includes the whole spectrum of roasting. And to demonstrate the impact of roast (like above with the SiJiChun), we compared the roasted version of RouGui with its fresh version.  

What made this comparison particularly interesting is the fact that the RouGui cultivar, while very popular in the WuYi mountains, is seldom to be found in Taiwan. And that's the beauty of Baozhong, its wide range of cultivars. While the high mountain Oolong is almost exclusively using the Jinxuan (up to 1300 meters) and Qingxin Oolong cultivars, Baozhong is made with all kinds of different tea trees and this provides material for endless discoveries and experiments! 

Of course, the biggest draw to my tea class is that I let the student brew tea under my guidance and help him improve on his technique. It's easier to teach in real life than through online video classes! On the other hand, I think it's already helpful to see a teacher brew on a monitor or the screen of an iPad than being on your own!

So, if you don't have a plan for visiting Taiwan in the near term, don't hesitate to join my tea classes. I should mention that they are FREE (except for the teas that you can purchase here). If you attend the online class on FB live, you are even able to ask questions about the tea we are brewing that day. And if you miss the class, you can catch it later on my YouTube channel!