This tea is another outstanding example of the wonderful tea from the Jun Chiyabari Tea Garden, a small & exclusive tea estate located in the mid-eastern Himalaya region of Nepal. It is so very delicious, and of interest to almost any and every tea drinker!
We select our ‘lots’, or ‘batches’ of tea from Jun Chiyabari very thoughtfully, and with a clear goal in mind. The tea makers at this famous and progressive garden regularly offer both extremely traditional manufactures of leaf and also new and varied manufactures that often push the envelope regarding withering, oxidation, roasting, firing, resting, and the other myriad core elements of tea manufacture.
We taste anywhere from ‘several’ to ‘many’ samples of each potential offering from our various gardens throughout South and East Asia; however, it is especially important with micro-lot producers such as Jun Chiyabari. We select the lots that we choose from their outstanding offerings based on a combination of what we like, what we find particularly exciting in a given season, and then sometimes we ‘go for‘ one or another unusual manufacture, such as the unique ‘Moon Drops‘ starting several years ago, which is technically in the same category as this tea, our Nepal ‘Jade Oolong‘ (both being oolong). However, these are extremely different one from another, and one would be hard-pressed to find another tea maker in Nepal who is manufacturing any oolong in the unique fashion of either of these fabulous teas. Moon Drops has much in common with Taiwan’s Bai Hao Oolong, but little historical linkage to any Himalaya oolong, the way that this Jade Oolong does! But in addition to these two, our friends at Jun Chiyabari offer other micro manufactures that tempt us every time!!
And so we happily offer more than one Nepal oolong again for 2021. This, the Jade Oolong, is a classic beauty; Moon Drops continues as our intriguing, avant-garde preparation, and we will offer other unique oolong manufactures as the season progresses: click to Nepal Oolong.
The level of oxidation of our new lot of 2020 Jade Oolong is in the upper range of what is traditionally appropriate for oolong manufacture. It has that clear, stone-fruit aroma and background taste that one wants in an exceptional oolong. It is neither tannic nor dull. It is deliciously drinkable and re-steeps many times, providing that the correct amount of leaf is used in the first place. Overall, it is an outstanding example of the classic tea maker’s art. As with most Nepal white, black teas, and oolongs that need some time to mature into their finished flavor profile, we expect this tea to reach its full flavor potential sometime this winter or early next year. The tea makers and our assessment of the life of this tea are that it will be delicious for several years and we anticipate that a lengthy storage is appropriate for this tea.
This year’s Jade Oolong is soft in style and has medium-large leaves that unfurl graciously in the teapot. It is quite reminiscent of some of the Taiwan oolongs that we offered in the 1970’s and 80’s – which were simply called ‘Formosa Oolong‘ back in the day (and that now primarily exist as the various ‘White Tip Oolongs‘. The cool, clean air of its pristine growing environment in eastern Nepal shows in the crisp and bright flavor in the cup. Even though this is what is known as ‘dark’ oolong, it has a clean crisp style and in some quarters might even be taken for a black tea. We think that it is quite thirst-quenching and mixes well with fruit juice or lemonade (‘golf’ anyone!!).
The gardens at Jun Chiyabari that produce leaf for this oolong are located at 6,000 feet in the ‘hills’ around Hile, a typical Himalaya hill-town, about 15 km west of Ilam (the major tea-producing region of eastern Nepal) not far from Sikkim and Darjeeling to the east, and Sagarmatha (Mt Everest) to the north.
We work directly with Jun Chiyabari Tea Garden for the teas that we buy from them each year. The tea makers at Jun Chiyabari have classified this tea as an oolong, but they have used innovative techniques in its manufacture. In actuality, this tea defies classification in the strict sense of tea categorization; however, the result is absolutely delicious, and fans of the last several years’ versions of this tea will find the flavor to be both familiar and similar, but at the same time this year’s manufacture is a bit more flavorful and richer in the cup.
Tea Trekker customers may have picked up on the fact that we do not tend to be fans of teas that are made in a different country from that of the tea’s historic place of origin. We are pretty traditional in our selections and shy away from much of the ‘innovative’ tea that is being made in different parts of the tea world today.
But we trust the work ethic and traditions that are in place at Jun Chiyabari and this tea is really a delicious, classically-styled, ‘interpretative’ tea borrowing from several manufacturing styles, and is a thoroughly delicious representation of Nepalese leaf manufactured into a Taiwanese-style, lightly-oxidized oolong.
We think that the character of this high elevation tea flavor epitomizes the terroir of eastern ‘Nepal’ – which is exactly the effect that Jun Chiyabari is intending to express.
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