The three May 8 Oolongs are teas that Song had a direct hand in during every stage of production, from field to finish.

Our work on this flagship series began in 2023. Working alongside a team of skilled tea makers, we crafted a long oxidized oolong with unexpected tropical notes with a rich, fruity character. That night of production yielded two teas: a mid-roasted version we named Amber, and its gently roasted counterpart named Gold.

In subsequent years, our attempts to recapture the essence of that 2023 tea met with unique challenges. Increased sunshine one year, imminent rain and a lack of qualified pickers the next. With each harvest, we’ve had to adjust and recalibrate our approach, learning more and exposing more flavor as our experience grows.

This year’s May 8 Oolongs brought its own set of unique challenges. Inclement weather delayed our expected harvest day, typically slated for the last week of April. As we waited for skies to clear, the leaves at our original garden on Shan Lin Xi continued to grow, finally exceeding the size suitable for the type of tea we were after.

We spent hours making phone calls to locate a higher elevation farm whose leaves had not yet grown out of range, opting finally on a remote 1600m garden in an area called Hong Xiang, south of Lishan.

It was a lucky break, not only in light of the tightly packed schedule of tea farms during the spring harvest and the fortuitous break in weather - the rain stopped during our scheduled harvest, but picked back up the following day - but also because this increase in elevation featured leaves that, as a rule, grow more slowly and with more concentrated flavor than tea trees at lower elevation. The confluence of all these factors results in a tea that is quite superlative.

With the lightest of charcoal bakes - just enough to set the leaves, and concentrate the plant’s innate sugars - we suspended this version, May 8 Gold, in a state as close to that of the night it was crafted as possible, creating an incredibly verdant and sweet-noted tea, and a wonderful counterpart to its amber-roasted and dark-roasted counterparts.