It begins, as every honest thing does, with one. One range, one family, one leaf plucked before the dew has lifted. Alishan is where we started — and where every bottle we make still begins.
"The clouds arrive at four each morning and burn off by ten. Everything that makes Alishan tea what it is happens in those six hours."
Alishan sits above the cloud line in central Taiwan — a range of jagged peaks, cypress forests, and steep terraced gardens that rise through mist to pine. The altitude slows the tea plant’s growth; the cloud cover softens the sunlight; the temperature drop at night locks the oils in the leaf.
We walk these slopes ourselves, twice a year. The spring pluck is what we are waiting for when we arrive in April — the winter’s quiet concentrated into one narrow week of picking. The winter harvest in November is sharper, more austere, and easier to distil around.
Every bottle we make comes from this single mountain. The botanicals that join the tea in each spirit are chosen to serve the leaf, not the other way around.
Four hectares above Shizhuo, three generations deep. The first trees went in on the upper terrace in the late seventies; the family who planted them still work the slope. The son runs the withering room, and his daughter runs everything else.
They pick only in the morning. Only two leaves and a bud. No spraying, no synthetic nitrogen, and the old cypresses at the ridge line are never felled — they break the wind and give the garden its shade pattern. We buy what they decide to sell us, and never ask for more.
Our main tea. A rare anthocyanin-rich cultivar whose young buds emerge deep violet before greening as they unfurl. Steeps out with an unusual floral-plum character and a rounded, slightly honeyed finish — the backbone of our flagship gin.
Our second tea. A spring-picked green base scented with fresh jasmine blossoms over successive nights — the flowers are added, rested, removed, and repeated until the leaf carries the perfume without a trace of the petal.
