The Essence of Tea Blog

The economy in Malaysia is terrible. Earlier in the year they brought in a 6% sales tax, which left restaurant owners, cabbies and other small business owners complaining about a fall off in trade. The Malaysian ringgit continued its slow and steady decline in value against the dollar, renminbi and pound sterling, making imports more […]

In 2012, we shipped a case of our Bulang Puer Tea directly from China to one of our friend’s warehouses in Malaysia. The rest of the tea, we shipped back to the UK and made available for sale. Since moving to Malaysia, I’ve been meaning to collect this case from his warehouse and have just […]

The Spring of 2015 was very interesting for us. We had some highs and lows and opened some very special doors for future productions. As I discussed in my previous post about pesticides in puerh tea, we had some setbacks and some shocks when we sent maocha for lab testing, but in the end we […]

We left Xishuangbanna quietly confident.  We’d found a number of candidates, some of the best maocha samples we thought we’d found since we’ve been making tea.  We tasted them and they were lovely.  Feeling no real need to, but just seeking confirmation, we sent the first two off to the lab to be tested for […]

One of the most frequent email questions we receive is from customers asking for recommendations of special teas. For the newcomer and experienced drinker alike looking at our selection for the first time, it might seem a little overwhelming. I thought I’d write a few posts giving some insights into our offerings & some recommendations […]

We recently got hold of a tong of the 2009 ChangYuHao Guafengzhai – a tea that’s been ‘sold out’ since 2009. The owner of ChangYuHao still had some in his own collection of course & recently agreed to let us have a tong to offer to western customers. This was quite interesting for us, because […]

We’ve been working out the totals and making a random draw for our trip to Wuyi this Spring. We’ve increased the draw to four people & sent emails to those who’s names were picked. If any of the people who have been picked can’t make it, we’ll continue the draw and select the next name […]