Floating Leaves Tea

When I got back to the states Shiuwen told me I was brewing tea really strong! During my time in Taiwan I really changed up my brewing, and I think it tastes great. Today we drank the King of Teas, Charcoal Dong Ding, and it was strong enough to stand a spoon up in it.

Drinking Mr Chen's Baozhong, one of our long time standards on the menu. It was an excellent season for Baozhong, and we had a great time drinking it and reminiscing about farmer Chen and his family this session.

This was a laid back session. Shiuwen got a chance to brew the new Homestyle Red Oolong for the first time. We are both really excited about this tea! As the name indicates, it's not a fancy tea per se, but it's a satisfying whole body experience. Now available on the dot com site only!

Yes, we're talking about Dong Ding again; the region that gave us Milk & Honey Oolong. Which we are drinking in the episode today. We went back to talk more about Mrs. Su and living up on the mountain. Also, we'll be drinking high mountain oolongs live on YouTube (Tuesday June 8th, 5pm PT). Hope you can join us! Link Here

This episode was basically my first impressions after spending a week up on Dong Ding mountain. The taste of the place is still fresh in my mind! I had such an amazing time, learned a lot and worked hard.

Shiuwen received her Lala Shan in the mail, so this session we decided to drink that tea! New crop of Lala Shan Hong Shui.

We took some time to explore three of the four high mountain oolongs I've chosen for the website, since Shiuwen's Big Box of Goodies arrived in Seattle recently. We drank Alishan, Shan Lin Xi and the Traditional High Mountain, a tea that I was able to see be processed start to finish. We are both really happy with this season's high mountains! All very fragrant, balanced and comfortable in the body. Looking forward to the Lishan arriving in Seattle so we can drink that one together, too!

The night before we recorded this episode, I went to go visit our teacher for the first time since arriving in Taiwan. That's the real fuel for why I'm here, to study tea roasting. It's the guiding principle that has kept us on track through lots of craziness. It was a great session, and I got a chance to unpack it a bit with Shiuwen on this podcast. Enjoy!

This episode was recorded shortly after I came down from the mountain, where I saw my first full oolong processing, start to finish! It was amazing, and during the recording I was still full of all that good energy. The style of the episode was more of an interview style. I got a chance to relay lots of information I learned up in the mountains! We will be selling this tea on our website in the next few days. Shipping direct from Taiwan!! If I wasn't here I never would have found something like this!

Hello again! This marks our first episode recorded remotely in both Seattle and Taipei! We toasted the near end of my quarantine period with a pot of Charcoal Dong Ding.

Thank you all so much for your support! We love you :) We're getting ready for Noah to head out in a couple of days, and we're so excited!! The next episode will be recorded long distance, with Shiuwen in Seattle and Noah in Taiwan. We've got to figure out how to do that, so expect some glitches. But it will happen.

This episode we drank a 30 year old tea for the grounding energy, and announced a big upcoming change for Floating Leaves!

Good session today, but no direct focus. It's the show about nothing! So Shiuwen wanted to name this episode Out of Focus. We decided to drink Four Roast Dong Ding again, for three reasons. You'll have to listen to find out why!!!

Revisiting an oolong that we got three or more years ago in this session. It's not been an easy tea to brew, but Shiuwen was ready for the challenge! Yunnan grown high mountain oolong, harvested from Tie Guanyin cultivar bushes, and charcoal roasted by a master in Taiwan.

This episode we compared the current batch of Loshan Hongshui (which is running low) with the batch that's coming up next. Very fun session, and got us into some good conversations about focus, attention and joy!

This was a powerful session. After listening, we want to invite you to check out this video from the Plum Village Zen Community https://youtu.be/AxsCainXGMQ After watching, if you want to try Shiuwen's challenge from the end of the episode, please feel free to reach out to let us know how it goes for you. We always love to hear from you! Enjoy!

This episode we are drinking Dong Ding A again! A new batch is always a great excuse to drink this tea. This time it lead us in all kinds of directions, and we ended up having a great conversation about structure, connection and rhythm.

Year of the Ox is upon us! (And Valentine's Day, and it's snowing in Seattle. Pretty cool.) We decided to start the first podcast of the Lunar New Year with an aged Alishan from 1985. First time we ever brewed it!

Lunar New Year is coming up, the Year of the Ox, and we're taking some time to nourish ourselves with a joyful tea. This episode we spent some time talking about what it really means to nourish ourselves, with tea or otherwise, in order to go deeper in the practice. Wishing everyone a peaceful and prosperous Spring!

This was more of a 'slightly veiled' tasting that a blind tasting, but we came back to taste Alishan and Lishan side by side without knowing which one came first. Really REALLY good session. Both of these teas are fantastic. After the blind tasting in early January we were intrigued by the fact that we couldn't choose a clear MVP of these two.

Once more! we are working with two unknown oolongs for a little blind tasting challenge to see if we can get out of our own preconceptions. This time Shiuwen picked the teas, and it was a blind session for me! (Noah) This was a really fun session to see what we know and what we don't know.

Just two roasted teas! This session we tasted two roasted oolongs which I chose and placed on the table without telling Shiuwen what they are. We wanted to have a grounded session focused on the sensations of these teas in our mouths and noses. Flavor, texture and aroma. Also, I'm a little obsessed with chili at the moment ;)

We dedicated this episode to brewing Special Reserve Alishan again since the first time we recorded it there were two other teas involved. It deserves it's own session! This pot of tea really guided Shiuwen to explore more deeply her intentions for tea and other things in 2021. The idea : Be softer to generate more energy.

For the first session of 2021 we are revisiting a Yunnan grown high mountain oolong that we've been working on for the past week or two. In the spirit of the practice process, and because 2021 is an Ox year, we drank this Furry Crab while discussing our goals, struggles and successes we've had while trying to fine tune the way we brew this oolong. May 2021 be full of good practice and hard work!

The last podcast of 2020! We drank an excellent high mountain oolong to celebrate, and pretty much all we could say was how excellent it is. I hope you enjoy the episode anyway, because it was a lot of fun to record. We're lucky, as it seems like teas show up particularly well when we're recording. Anyway, thank you all so much for your support throughout 2020. This tea will be up on the site fairly soon, and that's not something I would have thought possible even a year ago. We're so grateful to be able to share teas like this, and have such a wonderful support system throughout the US! Cheers to you all, and cheers to tea!

This episode was so much fun to record! It's the debut of a new line-up of high mountain oolongs that we're SUPER excited to share. Enjoy :) Also, it's Shiuwen's birthday on the day this comes out. Happy Birthday Shiuwen!!

There are so many new teas in the shop that we can barely walk around!! So we decided to drink THREE teas on the podcast this week. Two Charcoal Dong Ding Oolongs (comparing the last batch with this new batch) and one Hehuan Shan High Mountain Oolong harvested in November.

We're back after a brief hiatus to pack tea. Last week's sale went really well! Thank you to everyone who bought tea!! This week we are full of both gratitude and the desire to take a long nap. So we decided to have a laid back session with this comforting puer for the podcast this week. We call this cake of 2011 Menghai puer the "Big Sister Cake". It is a cake from our teacher Mr Zhan. Very grateful to have teas like this :)

The first fresh picked oolong from this year's Winter harvest at Floating Leaves IS... Smooth Water Baozhong! The weather was not especially favorable to tea production in Taiwan this year, but this farmer from Nangang pulled it off to produce something really special! We both loved it! After I pressed stop recording, our hands simultaneously raised in a 'thumbs up' motion and we gave each other a stern nod, to say "That's a solid tea!"

It's time for new Hong Shui! But this time we don't know if it's from Lala Shan or Lo-Shan (yet). For this episode we drank the new crop of Hong Shui and tried to figure out where it's from, and really focused on looking at the tea based on our objective experience. Really awesome tea! We'll have it up on the site sometime next week, and by that time we will be able to say definitely where it's from ;)

There's a new GABA oolong in the shop, and it's awesome! High elevation tea from Shan Lin Xi, and processed by the GABA master that taught the Lalashan farmer to make GABA tea. This episode we compared this new Shan Lin Xi GABA Oolong with the previous crop, AKA Nantou GABA Oolong. It was a fun, light session with two really solid teas!

Another Dong Ding session! We said a couple of weeks ago that we would come back to this new batch of Charcoal Dong Ding, and we did! Also, this is our faux Halloween episode! Happy (belated) Halloween!!!

I've been wanting to do this session for a few weeks now, and the weather was perfect for it today! Aged oolong is great for gently warming up the body as the seasons are changing. This time we drank an especially clean aged Baozhong from the 1970's, and talked a bit about how to spot potential in a tea for aging.

This episode we drank from two batches of Charcoal Dong Ding. And within the session, Shiuwen noticed the tea was taking us somewhere. The name of the episode is an homage to Red Pine, local author and translator of the Pacific Northwest, who asked Shiuwen the same question. This episode felt like we were sharing tea with him. Which prompts me to ask again... Who says you can't travel?

A new tea from Charcoal Master Lai arrived recently. Every time we've tasted it since it arrived, there's been more and more layers showing up. In the same fashion, the session that became this week's episode brought up some new things for us to chew on. This is a BIG TEA!

This episode was full of GABA in epic proportions. We drank TWO Lo-Shan Hongshui oolongs, the last of the previous crop and the first of this new crop. Both are excellent for different reasons, and by the end Shiuwen was giggling like a crazy tea lady! So much fun!

We've got two new high mountain oolongs in the shop: Alishan and Lishan. This episode we did a side-by-side tasting of the previous batch of each tea with the current batch of each tea. So that's TWO side-by-sides in ONE podcast. Wow! We got pretty lifted off of so many high mountain oolongs!

Dong Ding! AGAIN!!! This week we are comparing a fresh, new batch of Dong Ding A with the previous batch that we described as Dong Ding A Deluxe. We brewed them bowl style and drank with a ceramic soup spoon. The teas both showed up really clearly, which helped us easily pinpoint their differences and enjoy them! It's a really fun practice to get to know teas as they change over the seasons.

This episode we revisited an excellent batch of Charcoal Dong Ding just before it's sold out. The combination of roasting and aging over time have produced a wonderfully complex Dong Ding tea!

This episode we compared three different batches of our only tea we roast ourselves, House Oolong! We got into the topic of roasting a lot more than I thought we would. There's some good information in here if you want to try your hand at tea roasting at home, which I highly encourage you to try!

We had a light session with two easygoing tea, Oriental Beauty (or OB One) and Honey Beauty. The comparison was really fun, and we ended up getting onto the topic of cold brew... just, by chance ;) Both of these teas are new arrivals, and we wanted to feature them because they are sweet, yummy and refreshing!

This session we drank Taiji Hongshui (AKA Gongfu Hongshui) from Shi Ding. This is a really fun tea, and we enjoyed its relaxing effect. Especially after a long couple of weeks! We dug into some of the 'fundamental structures' as they show up in this tea. We'll keep revisiting these over and over because they build the foundation for clear observation of a good tea. Check out those original 'fundamental structures of tea' episodes from earlier this year if you haven't yet!

We're back!! We've been so busy packing tea, that we've mostly been drinking grandpa style in the shop. So to honor that, we recorded a light session of us drinking grandpa style tea. Enjoy! And if you're really busy, drink some grandpa style yourself. It's a great way to let the tea brew itself.

It's Floating Leaves 15 year anniversary! We're celebrating with a noon picked, charcoal roasted oolong from Taiwan. If you haven't had a chance yet, please consider entering our photo contest by August 5th to help us celebrate. We're giving away teapots! And the annual Anniversary Sale will start on August 7th.

A week ago, we did a session that ended in me (Noah) drinking two mystery teas in order to get out of my own head while drinking the tea. This week, I chose a tea for Shiuwen to brew, but she was not privy to the name of the tea. It was really fun! So mind opening to taste tea like this. It helps us get closer to the tea and see what it is objectively doing!

In this episode we started off with a delightful Baozhong, but halfway through I realized I was 'drinking' what wasn't actually there in the tea. Drinking with my mind. So we did a little experiment and it was really fun! The message was this : Know what you know, and know what you don't know.

After last week's episode, we have been doing a lot of thinking. This episode we drank a special batch of Charcoal Dong Ding, and Shiuwen reflected on some of the ideas that have been going through her head.

We had a very illuminating session the day before recording this episode, and this episode became very emotional very quickly. We drank Lala Shan for its calming and comforting properties, and ended up having some deep discussions.

We really felt like having another session with this beautiful tea. And by the end of the session we were both grateful we drank this tea, because it had a lot to say!

We have been enjoying and learning a lot from blind tasting high mountains, so we took a thwack at Dong Ding with the same method. This episode we 'cereal bowl' brewed three Dong Ding oolongs that are currently in the shop : Traditional A, Traditional B and Charcoal. It was illuminating, and we're looking forward to more sessions like this!