The annual visit to the Taipei Tea and Coffee Expo is over and was a great success. It was also a huge contrast to the one in Nantou the previous month. Flash, glamour and marketing budgets usually make the Taipei show a very different experience from the Nantou show and this year was no different. This year's show was very well attended and our friends who had booths were happy with their earnings. During the busiest time period of mid afternoon it was shoulder to shoulder crowds inching their way past very busy booths, bags of tea in hand. It was a pleasure to see, and it was also wonderful to see many younger people appreciating the higher quality teas...
This year’s winter pick is turning into a roller coaster of a year and it is not looking good for teas being picked in November. While the start of the season began with some stellar weather for the higher elevation teas, a couple late season typhoons have dropped a lot of rain on our beautiful island, potentially washing out some of the later teas of the season. Starting in mid October and ending around the beginning of December, winter picked tea can be some of the most geographically varied when it comes to quality. The weather really matters for good winter picked tea and the overall taste can be much more varied from year to year. The picking of winter...
Mountain Stream Teas Subscription Service November, 2025 This month we have filled this box with some teas we found at our annual visit to the 2025 Nantou Tea Expo. This year’s show was decent, not the best ever, but we still found some fun teas to fill up this year’s box. What are the teas we will look at this month? Included this month are: 1 - 2022 Purple Bud Sheng Cake, 800m elevation, 0% Oxidization, machine picked in Spring, 2022, Dong Ding, Nantou, Purple Bud Cultivar Tasting notes: Soft florals, dark grape/berry flavors, very strong 2 - #21 Black Tea, 400m elevation, 100% Oxidization, hand picked in Spring, 2025, Sun Moon Lake, Nantou, #21 Tasting notes: Strong ‘black teaness’,...
Incredibly, there is still no way to send packages with merchandise from Taiwan to the USA* through public postal services. We are not alone. Since August 25th, over 88 countries have placed some form of shipping restrictions on packages going to America due to an incomplete sanctions regime implemented by the USA. 88 countries is rather breathtaking in scope, as is the fact that after so many weeks there has been such little movement on fixing this problem. The problem is not with the countries shipping to the USA being unwilling to pay the sanctions. They, and we, are wiling to pay extra to ship to the USA. The problem lies in those countries not being ABLE TO pay the...
Our AI Policy: All AI generation in any publication of Mountain Stream Teas content will be labeled and described. If we do not mention AI, none was used in the production of that content. If AI was used, a detailed description of what was generated will be placed in the content. "The opposite of life is not death, it's the machine." -Ian McGilchrist The machines are becoming more 'life-like' each day. As we all struggle with the implications of the introduction of AI content generation in the digital commons, we at Mountain Stream Teas have decided to create an AI use policy statement. While we have watched the growth of AI generated content with interest, we have not used any...
