Buy Any Tea and add a travel tea infuser for an additional $10!
Oriental Beauty is one of the most delightful teas that we have to offer, and we’re thrilled to be able to share it with you. Known for its honey-like sweetness and soft floral notes, this Taiwanese oolong is truly a wonderful tea experience. It’s been crafted to be savored slowly, making it the perfect tea for a quiet moment or an indulgent break.
Our goal with this tea offering is to give you a taste of luxury and tradition mixed into one, with each sip carrying the signature smoothness and aroma that make it so special.
This tea is unique not only in flavor but also in its background. It isn’t just another oolong; it’s created through environmental processes that naturally enhance its characteristic sweetness, complexity, and delicate floral quality. The result is a tea with layers of delectable flavor that continue to reveal themselves with each brew.
Artisan Tea
Made with love.
Guaranteed Organic
Simply pure, clean tea.
Small Batch
These teas are very limited in supply.
A decade of tea research
18 Provinces, 31 Chinese cities explored in search of tea
Based in Taiwan, Yunnan, and Shandong
120+ years generational tea producing experience
Our Offering
We first encountered this tea when we purchased some from a standard tea company. The leaves were big and somewhat broken, but the iconic taste of Oriental Beauty was still there. A taste that is not easily forgotten. When we established a tea company of our own, an inquiry into this tea was at the top of the list. To our delight, this was no real challenge for the master of Taiwanese teas. He supplied us with a spring-picked Oriental Beauty that is on a completely different level from what we’d tasted before. Most Oriental Beauty teas are picked in the summer time. They tend to have a larger leaf as they’ve had more time to grow. Though summer harvested batches of this tea hold the same flavor profile, hence our immediate liking to it, the intensity of flavor is weak in compared to a Spring Oriental Beauty. Spring picked Oriental Beauty consists of 1 bud and two tiny leaves. This is revealing that the batch is indeed a spring harvested Oriental Beauty. Working with our tea master has allowed us to offer such a tea that delivers this exquisite quality and character at a price that makes it accessible while preserving its luxurious nature.
Background of the tea
The origins of this tea are rooted in both chance and technique. A tradition in Taiwan dating back to the 1930s, where a tea farmer discovered by accident that a crop seemingly “spoiled” by tiny leafhoppers produced a surprisingly smooth, sweet tea when processed. What initially was thought to be an irreparable flaw turned out to be a revelation—a tea with a natural honeyed flavor and rich, floral aroma that became a sensation.
Since then, Oriental Beauty has been refined by Taiwanese tea masters creating a unique processing method to further compliment its taste profile. It was found that when the leaves are allowed to oxidize longer than most other oolongs, the flavor deepens, promoting a rich profile with subtle fruit notes and a floral finish. This extended oxidation process—often around 60%-70%—is what assists this tea in giving it its special taste initiated by the leafhoppers, and setting it apart as one of Taiwan’s most cherished oolongs.
Brewing Guide
Brewing Oriental Beauty is all about bringing out its natural sweetness and floral aroma.
Start with water heated to a mere 185–195°F (85–90°C) to preserve the delicate floral and honey notes.
Western Brewing: Use 1 -2 teaspoons of leaves per 8-ounce cup. Steep for 2-3 minutes.
Gongfu Brewing: Use a healthy-sized palm full of tea per 100ml pot. Use a very generous palmful of tea for a 250ml pot. Steep 30-45 seconds for first brew, around a minute for subsequent brews. Adjust parameters per your preferences accordingly.
Tasting; Look for: first the honeyed sweetness, then subtle fruit notes, and finally a soft floral finish.
Additional Information
Buyer Beware: Because of the popularity this tea has gained, of course there are numerous fakes flooding the market. These fakes arise because supply cannot meet the demand. If you think about how rare of an occurrence this has to be to produce this type of tea, it makes sense. First, tea is predominantly harvested in the spring, but this tea must be harvested in the summer months so that the insects have time to attack the plants. Secondly, farmers need to have their crops actually bitten by the bugs, which you could imagine is very hit and miss. Thirdly, the yield of the harvest is roughly cut in half because you want the leaves bitten, but not overly bitten as such leaves are just too destroyed. These are just three of the main factors involved that make a crop of high quality Oriental Beauty very hard to come by. Because of this, the prices for this tea are extremely high. As example, the $62 that we ask would be around $150+ for the same amount of tea.
Our tea master’s family has spent generations refining the processing of what makes a delicious Oriental Beauty tea, and thus, our offering may not be the pinnacle of this type of tea, but it is an outstanding example of the quality behind this variant. It is what we would consider a luxurious tea experience.
