Our artisan farmers and tea-making masters pass on their generations of craftsmanship into the teas we make.
Our Craftsmanship
Oolong teas are among the most challenging teas to make. Being between a green tea and a black tea, oolong teas need to go through a labour-intensive and tedious process that requires precision and exquisite craftsmanship.
Every cup of tea you taste from UNITEA is a collective effort of our team of artisan farmers, tea-making masters and staff that ensure premium quality with freshness.
Our Artisan Farmers
It all starts from our tea garden. Our diligent farmers take good care of our tea plants using traditional farming methods that are sustainable, ecocentric and regenerative. We choose organic fertilizers such as ground soy beans without using toxic pesticides and chemicals that can harm our tea garden and neighboring ecosystems.
Our farming practice also maintains strong roots of our tea plants that can withstand erosion commonly found on high mountains. Our farmers continue their efforts to ensure healthy biodiversity is present in our tea garden by managing it regularly with love and care.
Not only do we care about our tea plants, we also care about the well-being of other soil beings (earthworms, healthy bacteria and fungi), small visitor beings (beetles, bees, birds), flowers and trees to ensure that they grow alongside in a healthy and happy way.
Our Artisan Tea Makers
After the tea leaves are freshly hand-picked by our farmers, they get transferred right away to our tea-making facility where our tea makers take over.
To add a signature aroma and flavour to our teas, it is our tea maker’s job to design each of the processing steps in subtle ways according to the cultivar, season of harvest, climate conditions of that particular time, altitude, soil conditions that affect the tea leaves. The combination of all these factors make up the terroir of the tea.
Our tea makers fine-tune oxidation and roasting levels to ensure exquisite flavour profiles, aroma and freshness.
Our Packaging Staff
After the tea leaves have been handcrafted and approved by our team of tea-making masters, our staff would start packaging them on site.
Here is where another step of quality control happens: the packaging staff would make sure the tea leaves are dried and cooled down enough to avoid moisture being sealed into our tea packages for delivery. We seal up our tea leaves shortly after our processing as we know further oxidation of our tea leaves would affect the teas’ flavours and freshness.
When our teas reach your hands, we want to make sure they have been packaged in a way that would ensure not only maintaining the freshness of our teas as they have left our garden in Taiwan and office in Vancouver but also optimal storage at your very own home.
“Nature is not a commodity that we own, but a community to which we belong.”
