Trendy tea novelties I like and don’t like

Soothing roasted shui xian oolong + Leafhopper’s approval ratings.

Shameless plug for my friend Wei Tchou’s new memoir about ferns, Little Seed!

Make this your first yancha

The tea: Wuyi shui xian oolong, sold by Happy Earth Tea. $8 for 1oz.

Yancha (“rock tea”) refers to the heavily roasted, twisted leaf oolongs grown in the Wuyi region of Fujian. I’ve written about this style before, but if you’re new to cliff tea, begin with this shui xian from a cozy teahouse in Rochester, New York. It has everything you want in a classic yancha at an attractive price. It’s practically a daily drinker.

I recommend cliff teas to people who dig whiskey. The sweet notes of toffee and vanilla are similar, and the tea’s powerful roast is reminiscent of the oak barrels used to age bourbon and Scotch. Some distillers have taken to using yancha in their whiskey as a novelty flavoring. I’m ambivalent about the idea. It sounds fun in theory, though I’m usually disappointed by the execution. Steeping tea in hard liquor only draws out its most obvious characteristics—in the case of Wuyi oolong, a hard roast; in the case of floral Earl Grey or jasmine, a scent that was added to the tea in later processing. The drinker misses out on the subtleties that make these teas so great to drink on their own, such as this shui xian’s mouthwatering effect and its crisp, soothing character that never fails to put me at ease.

The source: If I were to open a tea shop, I’d want it to be like Happy Earth. The tea is serious, with a focus on black styles from the Himalayas (co-owner Niraj Lama grew up in Darjeeling), and an expansive menu offers large pots, gong fu service, tasting flights, and some fun mixed tea drinks invented by the staff. But the relaxed communal energy is more neighborhood bar than stuffy teahouse. It’s hard to find experiences like this in New York City, where cutthroat commercial rents mandate a certain number of sales every minute. At Happy Earth, there’s no pressure to give up your table. You can meet fellow tea people at the tasting counter. Put simply: it feels good to be there. Online, Happy Earth offers most of its teas with prompt shipping. If you can’t make a visit, do check out their Darjeeling section. 2024 harvest teas have started to appear.

To brew: I prefer this tea with a lower dosage than typical for yancha: 4 grams in a 150 milliliter pot (1g/37ml), steeped for 20 to 30 seconds for the first few steeps, then 1 to 2 minutes for later ones. You’ll get four or five satisfying cups this way. There’s less complexity than you’ll get with higher grade cliff tea, but I think that’s a good thing when starting out with a new style. Flavors of vanilla, cocoa, and caramelized honey emerge with a subtle mineral twang. The oaky roast is refreshing and doesn’t overpower the leaves. If I could get tea like this in a restaurant or coffee shop, I’d be a happy clam.

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Let’s rate some silly tea trends

A recent visit to Xing Fu Tang has me thinking about the state of trendy novelties in the tea world. Xing Fu Tang is a Taiwanese chain that’s distinguished itself with housemade boba that are cut from dough and cooked before your eyes in a cauldron of bubbling brown sugar. It’s a fun visual, and the boba do feel fresher in my teeth, tender and delicately chewy. The brown sugar syrup is less cloying than I would expect, and the tea itself tastes like more than an afterthought. It’s a much more sophisticated boba experience than the $3 cups I grew up on. For $7 and up per cup, I’d hope so!

Xing Fu Tang is one of many boba purveyors offering a luxury version of what was once a simple drink. I’m not sure who wants this, but every time I pass by chains like Tiger Sugar and The Alley in Flushing, my local Chinatown, I see packed houses and long lines. Grocery store freezer aisles are newly full of brown sugar boba popsicles. In liquor stores, Mike has advanced from hard lemonade to harder iced tea.

What I see online appears more manufactured. Say what you will about the quarantine fervor for dalgona coffee, but at least that was a drink made by a real cafe with years of commercial success before it blew up. The tea novelties on Tiktok and Instagram seem engineered for viral propagation rather than a drinker’s pleasure. Actually drinking them isn’t the point—the consumption that matters is accumulated minutes of video watch time to goose engagement for the algorithm. Then the Today Show website needs traffic, so a blogger plucks a video from the social media soup to cover as “trending on Tiktok.” High online views become a proxy for trending offline behavior, regardless of whether that behavior exists in the real world or not.

All of which is to say: these are not trends to take seriously or earnestly. But some are certainly more clever than others. So let’s look at recent ones from the US and abroad and see if any have the sauce, or if they’re all just flashes in the pan.