Taihe TeaTaihe Tea
Where to buy it
Flavour
Light-fragrance style
Taihe is at 1,100 metres in Meishan township, on strongly broken terrain.
Broken terrain means microclimate: within one village, a sun-facing slope and a shaded one differ by hours of sunlight, and a valley floor and a ridge differ by degrees at night. So under one place name, this plot and that plot can be two different teas.
Which is why a village name is still not precise. A plot, or a grower's name, is.
Unfired. Clear golden liquor, obvious fruit, full and rounded.
Fair priceverified
One jin is 600 g. Below NT$800, be sceptical.
A reasonable range is NT$1,300–2,800 per 600 g. Below NT$800, ask more questions.
What to ask when buying this
One region can span 700 m to 1,700 m, with several times the price difference. The same name does not mean the same grade.
Spring and winter lots fetch the highest prices and the best aroma; summer and autumn are a step down in both.
If they will not let you taste but want you to buy 600 g of something expensive, walk away. It is the simplest and most effective filter there is.
A scannable producer record beats any verbal assurance.
Specifications
About the origin
Taihe runs from nine hundred to sixteen hundred metres, ringed by Fenqihu, Laiji and Ruili, ridge behind ridge, with a wide day-night swing. Before tea took hold the crop here was plums. The soil is gravelly; the tea comes out quiet in aroma and round in the mouth. Zhangshuhu, inside the district, is the best known of its villages — great boulders stand among the gardens, as though you had walked into the Wuyi hills of northern Fujian. It is the highest of them and gets the least sun, and what it makes carries a particular cold-mountain fragrance. Between 1991 and 1994 spring and winter leaf reached 2,500 to 2,800 yuan a catty and still sold out, with buyers waiting at the dryers rather than risk going home empty.
These figures will be updated if they change.
Brewing
Why this temperature
Ball-rolled oolong is tightly wound, and the first pour only reaches the outside of the pellet, so it needs water close to boiling to open at all. If it does not open, the later steeps swing between thin and heavy. The first and second steeps often take the same time or less, because the leaf does not truly unfurl until the second.
Temperatures follow the official category guidance. Source: TRES — Effects of water quality and temperature on tea liquor
Common mistakes with this tea
95°C or above. Too cool and the roast aroma never opens, leaving it flat.
Rolled-ball leaf needs the first infusion to open up; the second is then shorter.
Best drunk within two months.
The most common beginner regret is buying 600 g on the first try. Buy a jin only after you know you like it.
What to eat with it
A chilled jelly has almost no flavour of its own; a heavily roasted tea would bury it. A fragrant, lightly oxidised tea lifts it instead.
This one is Taiwan-only — not available overseas
Here are the closest teas we can actually ship you:
Alishan High Mountain TeaAlishan 1700m 1700 m Milky Osmanthus2.0–4.0kLocation accuracy: named locality (23.5200, 120.6700). This marks the growing area, not one specific garden.
Alishan Tea Region9
What there is to do here
6 routes Two days possible Meishan: Ruili, Ruifeng, Taixing, Taihe・Zhuqi and Shizhuo・Dabang, Tefuye, Lijia — Tsou villages
This district has the most itineraries, and nearly all of them run two days. Ruili, Ruifeng, Taixing and Taihe in Meishan are threaded together by old trails, bamboo, waterfalls and suspension bridges, and the guesthouses are the tea growers themselves. Further up are Zhuqi, Shizhuo and the Tsou villages. Every month of the year has its own crop.