Tea forté products are available from our online store, and at fine retailers, restaurants, hotels and spas worldwide. Thank you for visiting our website, we hope that you enjoy our products as much as we enjoy bringing them to you. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any comments or questions.
Green Tea, best known for its grassy vegetal notes and greenish liquor and leaves, is quickly steamed or pan-fired to denature the oxidizing enzymes, and to preserve its characteristic freshness. Without oxidation however, green teas must be steeped more carefully, as they can become bitter if steeped too long or at too hot a temperature. Green tea should never be steeped with boiling water. Near boiling or even cooler will produce much better results. Among our notable green teas is the distinctive Gunpowder tea, so named for its resemblance to actual gunpowder. Individual leaves are roasted in a pan, then hand-rolled into pellets resembling the gunpowder pellets used in British cannons. Other green teas, including ours, are known for having additional flavors incorporated into their blends. Finally, no discussion on green tea would be complete without mentioning the one tea with which we are probably most familiar, Japanese-style Sencha. For many, a taste for green tea was formed at a sushi restaurant where Sencha is often served at the end of an artfully created repast. Sencha warms the soul, cleanses the palate and remains one of our favorite greens.
The least processed teas are white teas. White teas contain only the buds and very young leaves of the tea plant. As a result, they are rarer and often more expensive. Their straightforward, yet delicate taste and health profile, similar to green teas, have helped them burst onto the Western tea scene in recent years. While white teas are "less processed" than greens, they are actually usually more somewhat more oxidized. Mild oxidation occurs during the "wilting" stage, when white tea is air-dried after it is first picked. It is then baked, dried further, and it may be very lightly rolled, but little is done to change what was picked from the plant. Because white teas are slightly oxidized they don't usually need to be steeped as carefully as greens. Unlike green tea, steeping white tea with boiling water, or for a longer time period or time, will still produce good results. Grown mostly in the famous Fujian province white teas have several well-known and rare blends. The most famous is Bao Hao Yinzhen or "Silver Needles". White tea is picked between March 15 and April 10 when precipitation is at its lowest, insuring a fair amount of undamaged and unopened buds. This is a very high grade tea and one of the most sought after; prized, and revered blends for the tea connoisseur. While green and black teas have been flavored and scented for centuries, flavored white teas are a relatively new creation. We have found that white tea enhances other flavors, and consider our White Ambrosia blend to be among our most innovative.
The dedication and determination to present the definitive cup of tea is more than what meets the eye. We work directly with the growers that share our passion to produce teas that yield diverse, subtle flavors that cannot be found in other tea offerings. There are no compromises. The quality of these teas represent less than 1% of all the teas available, and truly are the finest leaves in the world, making Tea Forté the experience without compare.
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