May 19th, 2020 was a dark day for the tea industry. This is the day when thousands of tea packages just went missing in Shanghai. Their last tracking update looked like this: 2020-05-19 15:49 上海市, 已交航空公司运输 (Shanghai, has been handed over to airline transportation). That was it. That is the last we saw of them. We had hundreds of orders whose last status update was this. China Post claims they all left the country. They even gave us a flight number "Airbus A320-240". As far as we can tell that's not even a plane capable of flying from Shanghai to San Francisco. The mystery deepened. After many hopeful months we realized that these packages were lost forever. We reached out to other tea companies and found that they had also lost a great many packages. This was tough for us but we know it was tough for our customers as well. We had a special on 5/19/2021 to commemorate the event but wanted to do more. We have pressed a special blend and we're calling it "519 Shanghai". This is a really great blend we spent a lot of time crafting. We had a very specific story we wanted to tell with this tea. We would not describe this as a beginner sheng. This tea comes out swinging. It has some of the richest aromas we've ever had. The aroma is sweet citrus / berry with floral undertones. It smells like a mix between a lemon drop and hawthorn berries. It's very enchanting. The tea has very noticeable early bitterness. It feels fantastic in the throat and the mouth. You can underleaf this tea and still get plenty of enjoyable sessions out of it. Once you get into the later steeps this tea is all sweetness. The flavors hover in the umami sphere with a nice brininess. You'll want to eat before a strong session with this tea. We have high hopes for this one aging over the years. There is some really amazing material in this blend.
