Honey Hon Cha Tender Heart Black Tea

Without a doubt, my favourite black tea. It's delicious without milk but even better with! This hand-picked tea is processed skilfully by hand to create its elegant spiral shape. Only 500kg are made each year because it comes from leaves bitten by tiny insects—a phenomenon that happens for just a couple of weeks in early summer. It's this leaf damage and the plant's natural repair response that creates the tea's distinctive sweet, honey-like flavour.

This Gold Medal-winning batch totals just 5kg. Like all the finest Taiwanese teas, it boasts a flavour and fragrance quite unlike anything else—its complexity is precisely what makes it so captivating. Our customers have detected notes of honey, peach skin, nectarine, dark chocolate, and one particularly evocative description: "the fragrance of drying grasses and wild flowers from the highest Alpine slopes of Switzerland."

Grown in Taiwan's beautiful Shangliao area in Taipei County, where insecticides are never used, this tea is made from the Chin Shin Gan Tze varietal. The plants are tended with care that respects both the craft and the environment.

Brew to your preference: with milk, use 3g (a good heaped teaspoon) per person and steep for 5–6 minutes. Black tea style, use 2g with a three-minute infusion—the leaves can be brewed 3–4 times over. Both methods are wonderful with a touch of sugar if you choose.