Organic Golden Monkey Tea is grown on a relatively small terraced tea garden that ranges from 600 to 1,500 meters (call it half a mile or so) above sea level in the rugged mountains in the southwest corner of Yunnan Province in CangYuan Township–just a few short miles from the border with Burma.
Golden Monkey is a well known tea in China, but not one produced in great quantities. It's origins are relatively recent - approximately 300 years ago in Panyang, Fujian. Features include the use of only the tea bud and first leaf, full oxidation, with the resultant golden tips that provide much of the tea’s color and distinctive flavor profiles.
And about that flavor? Just...wow. Though not a powerful tea like Gunpowder Green or Lapsang Souchong, there is a lot of depth to this sweet and fruity black tea. It’s complex and yet the flavor seems familiar. This is comfort tea, which is one reason the Golden Monkey teas have been enjoyed both within and without China for several centuries now.
About The Little Red Tea Co.
The Little Red Cup Tea Co. is a small, family-owned company based in Brunswick, Maine. We made our first trip to China more than 30 years ago, and since then we’ve lived in Beijing for several extended periods and visited scores of times. China is our second home; we love the people, we love the culture, we love the language, we love the food, and we love the tea.
Our goals as a company are two-fold:
We offer the kinds of teas that our friends in China routinely drink: simple, traditional, whole leaf varieties. Ours are teas that you can drink throughout the day—teas to keep you going. In China, tea never stops after the first cup, and we see no reason why that shouldn’t be true in the United States as well.
In this, we want to act as sustainably as possible. Every tea we sell is certified organic by the USDA, and certified fair trade by Fair Trade USA. We partner directly with the worker-owned cooperatives that grow and process the tea to reduce the number of steps from field to cup.
When you buy our tea, you support workers and their communities; paying a fair price for the tea they produce and sustaining social programs through fair trade premium remittances.