Whispering pines now offering Laoshan green???
I can’t believe it! Brendan you are at it again. I’m so curious to see how the WP one compares to the He families! The funny thing is that Yunnan Sourcing is now offering Laoshan Black and green but before that Laoshan teas seemed to be exclusively sold by Verdant. I didn’t know what else to do with my excitement about this new offering so I posted it here. Anyone else excited to try it? Thoughts?
I didn’t know WP was selling it but I also noticed that YS now offers Laoshan green in two grades. I believe they source it from a different farm (Liang family).
If I hadn’t already ordered some from Verdant, I would have picked up both Laoshan green teas from YS. It’s half the price of Verdant’s.
Exclusive tea is highly rare. This is just one more example of that. If you dwell on these things you’ll start to lose faith in the tea industry; if you had some that is.
I have to be careful what I say… but my love of oolong took me this route of searching and now I know the source of many mountain oolongs which makes it hard to go back to vendors who taste many and pick a few to source into their site or store via wholesale
It’s clear that this will hurt Verdant. I’m curious to try them all. Now if Laoshan Oolongs come out … then things get even more complicated.
@LP Yes exclusive tea is highly rare. It usually doesn’t make sense for a tea grower to ONLY ever sell to one company no matter what. Even our YS Brand Pu-erh teas could not be considered 100% totally exclusive since the grower may have an extra 20kg hanging around that they sell to someone else who makes a cake.
Regarding the exclusivity of Laoshan teas: We asked the Liang family how many growers there are in Laoshan, and they said “a couple hundred”. If you do a taobao search for 崂山绿茶 or 崂山红茶 you’ll find well over a thousand product listings for each. Laoshan teas can be good and some even great. These teas are available to anyone in China with an internet connection as well as any westerners who wish to navigate the taobao marketplace. As with ALL the teas we sell we hope that we can woo our customers with good quality, fair pricing and good customer service. We decided to sell Laoshan teas after getting scores of requests from customers. We purchased and worked through samples from 7 different Laoshan growers before deciding on the teas grown by the Liang family. I felt theirs were the best for the price and the best overall.
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