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great tea
It is only common sense that we love tea. It has excited and driven us. But it has never been easy buying tea in China. Each type has styles and qualities. Any oolong may be cooked to smell brighter or piled to taste deeper, and from here the processes just get more complicated. When my wife's friend married into a Fujianese tea trading family we had no idea the world that was about to open to us.
Now with a car and gps, we hike through China's tea lands meeting families involved in all aspects of tea culture, looking for where climate, earth and intact ecology come together around tea. Tea has a remarkable way of capturing where it was grown, and how it was cured, and its flavor ranges from a beverage to an incantation. Beautiful places sometimes have farming families making incredible teas.

Together with my wife and old friends we now deliver teas to enthusiasts around the world. At any given time our teas are an eclectic mix, and we're proud of their diversity. When our journey starts each spring, there is excitement, adventure, success and failure. Often the best teas we find are in such small quantities that we can only distribute them to our investors.

We buy tea from the source, from the small farms and small producers where we can walk the hills, visit the village, touch the trees themselves. We like buying tea from families more than buying tea from traders or factory farms, though there are traders who contact us with special old teas they have found. The oldest we have found is a Sichuan Dark tea stored in Yushu, Tibet since 1950. The best tea we have is a 1976 Liu Bao. Of course years of production do not mean much alone. We have noticed that some shops falsely age their teas in sauna-like contraptions or hide their best teas from a customer they believe ignorant. Some pretend to show better and better teas, only at last to swap in mediocre leaves, insisting these are the best of them all. Some vendors mix high and low quality leaves together. China's tea economy is truly huge, with thousands of well-established tea makers. Fraud is simply part of any art, and it pays to go to the source.

For anyone wishing to learn just how complex and pleasing tea can be, the paradox is that without tasting great teas it is not so easy to guage what is in fact too thin or otherwise tainted. And after trying a truly remarkable tea there is no going back. But then why would we? Passing on these teas, we can give tea enthusiasts pause while encouraging our own exploration. And this is, in a tea cup, our story.

We pay farmers a fair price, more than the market pays, and then we sell these teas directly to you, to other tea selling collegues, or we keep them for ourselves if we think there is no foreign market yet, as is the case for many of the best dark teas China offers. When you buy Little Mountain teas, your money goes to the farm that made the tea you bought. So you patronize and encourage the actual producer of the tea you like.

We work and live in China, which makes the shipping take a little longer. And we only deal in Chinese teas. We welcome any inquiries. And come again; we will be periodically updating as our 2011 tea collection gets underway.

We invite you to follow us on our journey in 2011: http://thoughtsontea.blogspot.com/

sincerely, littlemountaintea.com