'Honey' Hon Cha

Without a doubt, my favourite black tea. It is delicious without milk but more so with! This hand picked tea is also processed skilfully by hand to produce its elegant spiral shape. Just 500kgs are made a year due to the fact it is made from leaves that have been bitten by tiny insects. This only happens for a couple of weeks in the early summer. It is the damage done to the leaf and the secretions from the leaf to repair itself that give the tea its sweet, honeylike flavour. This Gold Medal winning batch is just 5kgs in total. In common with all the best Taiwan teas, this has a flavour and fragrance that cannot be compared to teas from anywhere else. Its very complexity is what makes it elude description! Among the myriad notes that our customers have used are commonly, honey, peach skin, nectarine, dark chocolate, of course honey, and perhaps the most specific “the fragrance of the drying grasses and wild flowers found on the highest Alpine slopes of Switzerland”. These grasses are considered sacred by the farmers and are hand cut and raked. This herbal and flower mix is perhaps a good way of imagining either of these special experiences. This tea is grown in the beautiful Shansia area of Taiwan’s Taipei county where the plants of course cannot be sprayed with insecticide. It is made using the Chin Shin Gan Tze varietal of tea bush. There are two ways to appreciate this tea depending on whether you want to have milk or not. If you use milk allow 3g or a good heaped teaspoon per person and brew for 5-6 minutes. It is worth the wait! If taking black, brew in the Chinese style with 2g of tea, three minute infusion time but the leaves can be brewed 3-4 times. Both ways are great with sugar.

Quantity: 1g per 100ml of water
Water Temperature: 100 ° c
Brewing time: 3-6 mins
No of infusions: 1-4
Milk: Optional