Start here
Discovery Sets
Buy the palate before you learn the vocabulary.
Choose a set
Three ways in
Each set is built around a different question. Pick the one that matches what you want to find out — or start with the Classic Six if you have no idea yet, which is the honest answer for most people.
The Classic Six
One tea from each category we carry — the broadest possible first taste. $42.00 · 6 × 15 g.
Set two
Coming soon — name, contents and price to be decided.
Set three
Coming soon — name, contents and price to be decided.
Discovery Set · Six teas · 15 g each
The Classic Six
Six teas chosen to show the range — a high-mountain Taiwanese oolong, a bug-bitten honey aroma, a purple Yunnan black. Enough of each for four or five sittings, so you can get one wrong and still learn something. Every pouch carries its own brewing parameters, and the card in the box tells you which order to drink them in.
Credit back: spend $42 here and we’ll email you a $10 code toward a full-size pouch of whichever one you liked.
What’s inside
Six teas, in the order we’d drink them
Chosen to be different from each other rather than to be the six most expensive things we sell. Two are teas we would not recommend to a beginner in isolation — they make sense next to the others.
The baseline. Barely oxidized, floral, and about as clean as a high-mountain oolong gets. Start here so everything after it has something to be compared against.
The famous milky one, and genuinely so — no flavouring, just the cultivar. Drink it second and the contrast with the Qing Xin does the teaching for us.
Where roasting enters the picture. Same species, same island, an entirely different cup. This is the one that punishes boiling water, so read the pouch.
Leafhoppers feed on the young leaves and the plant answers with honey. Nothing about it can be manufactured — it only happens when the insects arrive.
A purple-leaf varietal picked and processed as a black tea. Malty without the tannic edge most breakfast blends carry, and forgiving if you overshoot the steep.
The rarest category in the box — a slow smothered oxidation almost nobody still does. Save it for last, brew it at 75°C, and give it your full attention.
How it works
Three sittings, and you’ll know what you like
Drink them in pairs
The card in the box pairs them — light against light, roasted against unroasted. Tasting one tea tells you very little; tasting two side by side tells you everything.
Use the parameters
Each pouch prints its own temperature, leaf ratio and steep times for both gongfu and Western. There is no guessing step, and no ruined first pot.
Spend the credit
We email a $10 code a week after delivery. Put it toward a full-size pouch of the one you kept going back to — that is the whole point of the exercise.
The arithmetic
$42 instead of $61
Bought individually as the smallest available size, these six teas come to $61. The set is not a sampler of offcuts — it is the same leaf from the same lots, in smaller pouches.
| Qing Xin “Legacy Cultivar” · 15 g | $9.00 |
| Jin Xuan “Gold Standard” · 15 g | $7.00 |
| Frozen Summit “Dong Ding” · 15 g | $6.00 |
| Bug Bitten “Golden Nectar” · 15 g | $9.00 |
| Purple Yunnan Black · 15 g | $15.00 |
| “Yunnan Imperial” Yellow · 15 g | $15.00 |
| Discovery Set | $42.00 |
Before you ask
Questions we actually get
How much tea is 15 g?
Four to five Western mugs, or three full gongfu sessions. Enough to brew a tea badly once and still have it twice more.
Do the teas change with the season?
Yes. We buy in small lots, so when one sells out the set moves to the next comparable tea rather than to last year’s harvest. The card in the box always matches what is in it.
Does it come with anything to brew in?
No — a mug and a strainer will do. If you want to try gongfu properly, the 100 ml gaiwan is $17 and pairs with everything in the box.
Can I give it as a gift?
Gift wrapping is $6 at checkout and includes a hand-written note. We leave the price off the packing slip on every order, gift or not.
What if I don’t like any of them?
Return it within 30 days, opened, for a full refund. We would rather know than have you quietly give up on loose leaf.
