What is single-origin tea?

Single-origin tea comes from one garden, in one place, picked in one harvest. Not a blend of leaves from several farms. Not a "house style" mixed to hit a consistent flavour year after year. One source. One season. One cup.

Why it matters

Most tea on supermarket shelves — even the expensive kind — is blended. A buyer tastes lots from a dozen estates, mixes them to a target profile, and sells the result under a brand name. It's a useful trick: the tea tastes the same in January as it does in July, and the price stays flat.

But blending flattens the tea. The point of a single garden is that it doesn't taste the same every year. Spring picks drink brighter than autumn ones. A rainy week softens the leaf. A cold snap concentrates the sweetness. When you drink single-origin tea, you're drinking the weather.

Single-origin vs single-estate vs single-cultivar

The terms get sloppy. Here's how we use them:

• Single-origin — from one geographic region. Tight, but not always narrow (a region can hold many farms).
• Single-estate — from one specific farm or garden. Narrower still.
• Single-cultivar — from one varietal of the tea plant (e.g. Trung Du in Thái Nguyên). This is about the plant, not the place.

Our Thái Nguyên green tea is all three: one region (Tân Cương, northern Vietnam), one garden, and one heirloom cultivar. That's not a marketing choice — it's just what happens when you buy from a single family who has tended the same hillside for generations.

What to expect

The first thing you'll notice with a good single-origin green is that the second steep tastes different from the first. That's not a flaw. The leaf is unrolling its history: what the soil gave it, how much sun it caught, when it was picked. A blended tea tries to hide those things. A single-origin one lets them speak.

If you're new to it, start with three grams of leaves and one hundred millilitres of water at 75–80°C. Steep for forty-five seconds. Then pour a second cup with a shorter steep, and a third with a longer one. That's the whole ritual.