This Lapsang Souchong (Zheng Shan Xiao Zhong, 正山小种) is amazing. We know, that’s a bold statement, and some will disagree. But Lapsang Souchong is a love it or hate it proposition, and we’ve given our hearts to this tea. This is one of our strongest teas, think bridge abutments or skyscraper foundations. This is our most pungent tea — it comes in a Ziplock bag in addition to the regular packaging.
The black tea is redolent three distinct flavors at once — the black tea base, a hint of longyan (Dragon Eye, a Chinese tree fruit similar to lychee) and the pinewood smoke which is the tea’s most defining element.
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.