Explorer 3

Baiguanshan, Yongchun

Laocong Shuixian Kaishan 2023
永春 老樅水仙 開山

Laocong Shuixian Annual 2023
永春 老樅水仙 一年一採

Laocong Foshou Kaishan 2023
永春 老樅佛手 開山

Laocong Foshou Annual 2023
永春 老樅佛手 一年一採

Limited edition of 40 sets. 25g of each tea, 100g total. Please limit 1 set per customer.

To tell the story of this edition of Explorer, we first have to explain how our initial foray into Baiguanshan with Laocong Foshou Kaishan 2022 panned out in unexpected ways, and why the Kaishan designation continues into the 2023 harvest year.

As we explained in the description of the above inaugural Kaishan tea, "Kaishan 開山 means "mountain opening," or in this case, the very first spring harvest of an old grove of laocong foshou trees being brought into production for the first time. Subsequent vintages from this garden, therefore, will not be referred to as Kaishan." To be more precise, we should have said that subsequent vintages from the already harvested trees will not be referred to as Kaishan.

Initially, we looked forward to the second-year harvest from the trees that contributed to the Laocong Foshou Kaishan 2022, and the prospect of witnessing the effects of harvesting for two consecutive years — specifically, looking for any drop-off in the potency of these teas — was quite intriguing.

As it turned out, the teamaker had something more far-reaching in mind: rotating through the previously unexplored areas of Baiguanshan spanning 30,000 m² and producing both Kaishan Shuixian and Kaishan Foshou in small batches from a different set of old trees each year. In addition, a section of the Baiguanshan area devoted to once-a-year harvesting ("一年一採") in continuous production complements the small batches of Kaishan teas. in this way, it will be many years before each Kaishan batch trees are harvested again, and the greater Baiguanshan area under the purview of this teamaker has a great chance maintaining its wild character not only on paper, but in the vitality and strength of the resulting teas.

While we are missing the opportunity to see how these old trees would respond to entering regular production from its wild state, once we understood the long-term vision of the teamaker, the idea for this Explorer 3 almost immediately sprung in our minds.

Here, we present four teas from Baiguanshan: Kaishan vs. Annual, Shuixian vs. Foshou, all harvested from a single origin of Baiguanshan in its wild (huangye) state without any other intervention.

With the introduction of these four teas, we also bring to a close (for the time being anyway) of our own exploration of Yongchun. We look forward to offering these teas for as many years as they will be available, while we turn our attention elsewhere for inspiration for the next Explorer...

Individual teas in this set may be made available separately in the coming months, depending on remaining availability.