Our teas are not certified organic. In China that certification can be easier to buy than it is to earn, and teas we have independently tested carrying the label have still come back with residues we would not want in a bowl. The label alone was never going to be enough for us.
So we built our own testing system, and it goes above and beyond the “organic certification.” Five things we hold every tea to, regardless of label, each as important as the next.
01 · Grown from seed
Plantation tea is grown from cuttings, clones that live thirty to fifty years. Seed-grown trees can live thousands. Every seed is unique, and so is every tree it becomes. The cup carries a depth and character no cutting can copy.
02 · Room to grow
Trees need lateral space for their roots and vertical space for their crowns. Cut the crown and the roots shrink with it. Pruned and crowded trees cannot grow deep. Deeper roots draw more from the mountain, a fuller taste that holds across many steeps.
03 · Among other life
No monocropping. Tea grown among the bugs, fungi, grasses and trees the leaf depends on. Forest tea. Garden tea. Tea that knows its neighbours. A living system keeps the plant well on its own, and the leaf tastes of everything around it.
04 · Chemical-free
Not because of a label, but because the leaf carries everything the land carries. Trees that survive on chemical fertiliser are not drinking from the mountain. They are drinking from a tube. Nothing reaches the cup but the tea and the mountain it grew on.
05 · No irrigation
Trees that are watered do not push their roots deep. Trees that are not watered have to, reaching down through the rock for what they need. The flavour, and the medicine, are in the depth. That reaching concentrates the leaf, a deeper cup and more of the medicine.
A longer, slower way to choose tea. The difference between tea you can taste and tea you can feel.
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