Origins
Where these teas actually come from
Mountain regions, a handful of growers, and high standards
What we require
Old Mountain Tea Guarantee
Organically grown
We mainly buy from growers who farm without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers. Most of our teas are USDA & EU certified organic; the few that aren't, like our aged Pu-erh, are marked on their product pages.
Single origin
One grower, one slope, one harvest window. Nothing here is blended to hit a price.
Small batch
We buy what a grower actually made. When a lot sells out we wait for next season rather than substitute.
Hand-harvested
Picked and processed by hand, by people who have done it for longer than we have been buying.
How a tea gets here
From slope to your kitchen
Sourcing trip
Timed to the flush, so we taste in the room where the tea was processed rather than months later.
Blind cupping
Everything is tasted against the previous season before we commit to a lot. Most samples do not make it.
Small-lot purchase
We buy the batch outright, at the grower’s price, and it ships whole rather than being pooled.
Packed to order
Sealed in small quantities as orders come in, so the tea ages in bulk storage, not on a shelf.
We don’t run the farms. We spend our time finding the ones worth buying from.
Most tea sold in the West passes through three or four hands before it reaches a shelf, and by then nobody can tell you which slope it grew on, in what week, or how long it sat in a warehouse. That is the part we set out to fix — not by buying a farm, but by shortening the line between the person who processed a tea and the person who drinks it.
What that looks like in practice: we buy in small lots, direct, from organic growers in Taiwan’s mountain valleys and from independent artisanal processors in Fujian and Yunnan whose work never reaches a Western shelf. We taste before we commit. When a lot is gone, it is gone — we do not blend last year’s harvest into this year’s to keep a product page alive.
Every tea here earned its place on taste alone. Elevation and cultivar explain why it tastes the way it does; they were never the reason we bought it.
From the source
Our organic tea farms in Taitung, Taiwan
A beautiful remote mountain valley — one of the many clean locations we source from.
Most of our teas are certified organic under both the USDA National Organic Program and the EU organic regulation. The few exceptions, such as our aged Pu-erh, are marked on their product pages.
Certified Organic — USDA & EU
