Seven Cups

First spring teas of 2026 are coming out the gate tomorrow at 11:00 AM MST tomorrow. 🐎🍃马上到, buddy!

When tea bushes (and Austin) are left to their own devices, they can really go off. These are 9ft tall shrubs of Fuding Da Bai, the great commercial tea cultivar of Fujian. Heavily planted since the 1980s, they’re the stalwart beauties behind Silver Needle and Bai Mudan white teas and also so many green teas throughout China. Here they are in the cool hills of Shaowu prefecture, about an hour’s drive south of Wuyishan. The garden manager originally planted them here as an experiment, but they’ve since grown up to be ornamental giants.

The 19th century painter Paul Cézanne said some wild stuff about fruits and vegetables.

If you ask us, he could have just as easily been talking about some leaves of sheng puer when he declared:

“[They] like having their portrait painted…their thought is given off with their perfumes. They come with all their scents, they speak of the fields they have left, the rain which has nourished them, the daybreaks they have seen.”

Cézanne, I doubt you ever got the chance to taste a pot of sheng, but if you had, I’m sure you’d be right there with us, gushing about the way sheng’s bare-bones processing lets the tea leaves paint their own picture, each batch a landscape of their home.