Three teas, one mailer, your choice of frame
Pick-three is not a category in the botanical sense — it is a discovery format. The library rotates through six tea families: green, white, yellow, oolong, black ( hóng chá, 红茶), and shou or sheng pǔ’ěr (普洱). Each sachet holds roughly 4 grams, enough for two careful gongfu sessions or one generous Western pot.
The teas in the library are pulled from active harvests our roster has cleared for sale on shop.thetea.app and shop.puerh.app. That means a spring 2024 Mí Lán Xiāng (蜜兰香) dancong from Phoenix Mountain might sit on the same shelf as an autumn 2023 Junshan yellow or a winter-pressed shou cake from Menghai. Picking seasons differ by family — white teas favour the first flush in late March, dancong oolongs are picked in mid-April when the orchid aroma develops, and shou pǔ’ěr is wet-piled long after harvest.
Processing varies just as widely. The greens in the library are pan-fired in iron woks; the whites are simply withered on bamboo trays under filtered sun; the yellows undergo the slow mèn huáng (闷黄) smothering step that gives them their mellow corn-silk note. Oolongs are bruised, oxidised partially, and roasted over charcoal. Blacks are fully oxidised, sometimes pine-smoked. Shou is fermented over weeks in heaped piles. The point of Pick-three is to taste these processes side by side — three small cups in one afternoon, with notes you write yourself.
Sensory range across a single mailer can be enormous: a grassy Lóng Jǐng (龙井) next to a honey-thick yinzhen next to a charcoal-warm Wuyi rock tea. We do not recommend pairings — the pleasure is in the contrast you draw. If you want a guided sequence, the tasting frameworks at tea.school cover blind-flight protocols, and thetea.app holds the full encyclopedia entries for each cultivar in the library.
This quarter’s library
Roughly eighteen single-origin teas are open for picking right now, refreshed as harvests clear our roster’s tasting table.