Gunpowder Green Tea (Zhu Cha, 珠茶) has been made in China for well over a thousand years and exported for almost that long. Traditionally the tea leaves were rolled into small balls or pellets which helps the unfermented tea leaves withstand storage and transportation without undue breakage which could lead to unwanted oxidation or flavor loss. Gunpowder Green Tea is not, in fact, rolled into pellets, but the traditional green gunpowder flavor is retained.
Gunpowder Green Tea has a robust, slightly smoky flavor, and when steeped produces a lovely yellow colored brew. The aroma is light with a mild smokiness which also evokes thoughts of newly mown meadows.
Gunpowder Green Tea is a great get-up-and-go tea, marvelous first thing in the morning as well as into the heart of the day.
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.