BEST HIGH MOUNTAIN TEA IN TAIWAN: ALISHAN

How is it going everybody? My name is Wes Davies. Welcome back to another very special video. I'm actually way, way up here on the Chishui Trail in the mountains of Jiayi County, just as we're getting close to Alishan Mountain. And I'm sure a lot of you guys in Taiwan know, this is one of the best places on the entire island of Taiwan to grow all kinds of the best tea that you can buy. So today we're going to the Chishui Tea House and what they're going to do is they're going to teach me all about the tea making process, the tea drying process, and what I'm looking forward to the absolute most is actually heading further up the mountain and seeing these beautiful tea fields. Some of the most pristine, natural tea growing environments that you could possibly wish for. So hope you guys will follow me on this video today. I'm really, really looking forward to showing you everything. Let's go check it out. So we're completely surrounded by oolong tea fields. And if you ask anybody in Taiwan, Jiayi specifically is famous for its tea fields and for its excellent quality of tea. It's known for its quality all around the island. If you tell somebody you're drinking Jiayi oolong tea or Alishan tea, you know, tea from the mountains of this area, everybody knows that that's some of the best stuff you can get. Okay, we're at Wumendala and we're about 1,300 meters above sea level. And let me just show you what I mean here. You can see all the way down to Jiayi City. There's a lake down there that's Lantan and yeah, you can just see how far we've climbed. So let's take a look. Wow. When I woke up this morning, I had absolutely no idea just how beautiful it would be up here in the mountains of Jiayi. I mean, we drink tea every day, or most of us do here in Taiwan. And for example, I didn't even know that tea plants had flowers on them. So I think coming up to places like this, to tea farms up in the mountains, it's just a really great opportunity to sort of educate yourself on something that we think is so common, but you don't necessarily know everything about it. Well, certainly I don't know everything about it. But that's why it's really amazing to come up to places like this and speak to the farmers and speak to the tea farm owners here and just get educated about how they grow the tea, the different kinds of tea. Just everything I'm learning today is new to me. And I think this is a really, really unique opportunity to come up here in Taiwan and in Jiayi and just immerse yourself in this amazing tea culture here. So I really, really hope that my camera is able to pick up just how spectacular this landscape is. I mean, I'm walking in these gorgeous green tea fields. You can see the mountains rising up all around me. The clouds are just clinging to the sides of the mountains. And the farmer was just explaining to me that they used to have fruit farms here, fruit fields. But the problem is the monkeys would actually come and steal all the fruit. So what they decided to do was transform all the fields into tea fields. And it turns out that this was a really, really good idea because tea loves to thrive in kind of upper altitude climates such as this. And one of the benefits is that because of the cooler air temperatures here, it means there's much, much less insects. So the farmers here, they actually don't even need to use pesticides or chemicals in order to keep the insects away. That just leads to a much more natural, much cleaner environment for these tea plants, which of course is one of the reasons why this area is renowned for such high quality and beautiful tea. Honestly, we've been up here for a couple of hours now. I think I might just decide to leave Kaohsiung, let my apartment go, and possibly just build a cabin up in these mountains. I'm having such a great time up here. It's so peaceful. It's so relaxing. The air is so fresh. I think I might be a mountain man now. So the boss just taught me how to pick the tea leaves. And I guess you should choose something like this where you have three or four small leaves on the top because the smaller the leaf, kind of the less bitter the tea will be, the sweeter it will be. I think my job now is to just help them pick the tea and then someday somebody down in a tea shop in Jiayu City is going to drink this. So yeah, let's hope I'm doing a good job here. So we're here in the tea drying room and this is actually the same tea leaves that we picked up on the mountain earlier today. And what they've done here is they've laid this tea out like a blanket because the slower and more gradual these tea leaves can dry, the more aromatic the final product will become. So after the indoor weathering section of the tea making process, we come in here to the stirring station. The tea will be stirred all night in these really old school kind of wicker machines and then they take the tea over to the fermentation station and then after this we will go upstairs into the rolling room. So what you're looking at right here is some of the best quality red tea up here on this mountain and it is so aromatic, it is so fresh smelling, so natural smelling. I cannot wait to try some of this a little bit later on. So we are kind of caught inside right now, it started pouring rain, but that's actually one of the reasons why the quality of this Ali Shan high mountain tea is so good. Because of all this great fresh water that it gets. And I just wanted to quickly mention right before we actually try the tea for ourselves is the Taiwanese government and especially the Council of Agriculture has created something called the United Tea Estates Enterprise. The UTEE is a collaboration of tea estates from all over Taiwan with the common goal of transforming the Taiwanese tea industry and promoting its unique culture all around the world. UTEE harnesses a wealth of experience from their long standing tea growers and shares this knowledge and expertise with the younger generation of farmers. Together they are driven by a passion to innovate and deliver the best quality tea to the world. Please visit the website to learn about Taiwanese tea culture, the history of these estates, and perhaps even book your own tour of one of the over 30 tea farms all across the island. Okay so as I mentioned before, this is the tea that we were watching get rolled in the other room. So this is as fresh as you can get. Mmm. Very good. Yeah, it's really aromatic and it smells like almost this entire tea farm. It's a little bit nutty, I would say, and I really love that kind of honey brown color. This is absolutely delicious. Thank you for showing me around today, it was awesome. Okay guys, that is the video. Thank you so much for watching. Hope you enjoyed watching it as much as I enjoyed filming it. I really had a great time up there in the mountains of Jiayi. I'm just doing a little bit of traveling here in Taiwan's north, and luckily the tea house gave me a portable pack of tea bags, which I've been traveling with, and I just made myself a nice morning cup. It's still as delicious now as it was in the mountains. The quality of this tea is unrivaled as far as I'm concerned. I will put the address of the Chu Shui Tea House right down in the description if you guys want to go visit. I took a cab, but you can easily get there by car or other means right from Jiayi City. Pretty easy to get there, and do check out the UTEE website, which I will also link below if you guys want to book your own tour at one of the over 30 tea houses in Taiwan, or learn about Taiwan's amazing tea culture. So with that, I'm just going to sit here, enjoy my tea, contemplate what adventures will come next, and I will see you guys in the next video. Take care everybody.