Hello everyone! We're finally publishing a blog post after a really long time! The last year has been busy with us shifting our warehouse and upgrading our website, logistics and other components required for our scaling up!
Now that these things are taken care of, we're back to giving more attention to our core, unique Indian teas from lesser known regions! And the first focus in this series is going to be Sheng Pu'erh style teas from India.
The start & the history
We have been offering these teas from early 2019 and have been constantly upping our game by improving our processing and getting them closer to the actual sheng style. The most successful attempt was the 2022 batch, with the oxidation in check and the leaves remaining green after pressing and in dry form as well! Although, we will probably be making one of our darker shengs in 2023 again, since people love that and have been asking for it, we of course love it too! The touch of oxidation makes for a much sweeter brew. Talking about its history in the Indian tea world, the only similar tea is probably the singpo phalap and its multiple variants(although still very different), there is no recorded history about compressing teas in India, making us the first ones to successfully do this!
Innovation
Last year saw another interesting thing in this regard, we started offering sheng style teas from Assam and Mizoram as well! The Assam Sheng Maocha is one of the finest examples we have tried and there's no doubt Pu'erh fans would enjoy this made from plantation assamica leaf, only from India this time! We'll be trying to get more batches of these as well, probably from autumn harvest 2022 and of course from 2023 spring harvest!
Latest Additions
The Mizoram sheng was an experiment undertaken completely by us! It started after we received a batch of first flush black tea sample from Mizoram, which reminded us of a sheng Pu'erh more than a first flush. The most interesting part? It was made using AV2 cultivar, one of the most popular Darjeeling varietals. One more interesting thing? This is made from camellia sinensis var sinensis, the first of its kind we know of! The maocha was processed in late spring 2020 and pressed after two years of ageing in summer 2022. We could not make a lot of it in 2021 and the 2020 batch got sold within days, not a surprise because of how small the batch was. We made another small batch in 2022 which has just been released, we look forward for you to try and enjoy that! We'll be sure to produce a bigger batch in 2023 and release it quicker this time, now that the processing part has been completely optimized for the outcome!
The Future
To sum up, we currently have Indian sheng Pu'erh(style) teas from 3 regions, with 6 variants from Manipur itself! The newer regions(to sheng tea) of Assam and Mizoram have just one variants each but we are looking forward to introduce more very soon!
Check out our complete collection here.