While in San Fransico, I had the opportunity to visit Red Blossom Tea House, with my mother, who took the photos inside the shop. It was quite the experience as I really have only visited one high quality tea vendors "shop" prior to this, especially one where asking to try something brewed is somewhat common place. As part of my goal was to get back in touch with Wuyi Yancha, I asked to try some Tie Lo Han, which gave a chance for discussions to start. We were helped by Alice, who was wonderful.
I am not entirely sure what happened next but somehow we sat at the tea table for roughly an hour, as a few others stopped by and left, while several other teas were brewed, in total two Wuyi's and 2 Taiwan oolongs. I feel it was in part luck and in part because I think I demonstrated that I wasn't the typical tourist in China town visiting a teashop that lead to me trying all these different teas.
They seemed to be slightly pushing their High Mountain Formosa oolongs, which while good, were not quite what I was looking for, but I did leave with 6 Ounces of Yancha, and 4 ounces of their aged Tung Ting, along with a new Yixing pot, to hopefully use for yancha, (which seems to be preforming wonderfully so far).
I highly encourage anyone visiting the San Fransico area that is an avid tea drinker to try and stop by Red Blossom Tea. Especially if you like Celedon teaware, I am still mentally drooling over some of their pieces, most of which are not up online yet.
2 comments:
Red Blossom is by far my favorite tea destination in San Francisco! I have not been to Samovar, though, but I feel as if I will still like Red Blossom better!
Nice post :) I love the tea ware they offer there. This place has been on my "must visit" list for some time. I ordered some of their Aged Orchid tea awhile back (which for some reason is listed on their pu-erh page although it's a black tea) but found it way too funky for my taste (maybe because I was expecting puerh and not black tea as a base). But I've heard they carry some good teas.
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