This is Yun Hai Taiwan Stories, a newsletter about Taiwanese food and culture by Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉, founder of Yun Hai. If you aren’t yet a subscriber, sign up here.
It’s almost the season of the sparkle: candles at late fall dinners, string lights, sequins, champagne towers. Actually, I participate in very few of these things, being decidedly matte in aura, but I do have one bit of glitter for your consideration: sparkling tea, crafted by Sensitive Creatures Lab from tea and botanicals grown in Taiwan. They take age-old Taiwanese tea traditions somewhere new, with experimental farm-to-bottle tea beverages, and we’re excited to be distributing their non-alcoholic line for e-commerce and East Coast wholesale. These are also available in the brick-and-mortar shop as of today!
Tea is not gold, per se, but it is Taiwan’s liquid gold, as dramatized in Gold Leaf 茶金, a TV show about the heyday of Taiwan’s oolong tea production. It comes highly recommended by our COO Lillian Lin. If you’re looking for something to do this weekend, give it a watch.
And speaking of liquid gold, our peanut oil is on sale. We have a supply of plastic bottles that can be purchased for 20% less than the glass ones. I consider this to be an indispensable product and, yes, it also sparkles under certain conditions. Don’t miss out!
On September 1st, we moved to a new studio (bless this mess!). This space is Yun Hai’s conceptual home, where we test out products, design mockups, take photos, develop recipes, and hang out.
(I promise this relates to tea, by the way, but it’s going to take me about 250 more words to get there.)
As we’ve been unpacking, one thing has taken over our available shelving: random boxes of reusable bags. Just kidding, I’m trying not to think about those.
Take two. One thing has taken over our available shelving: our growing collection of everyday objects from Taiwan, from welcome mats to stools to bento boxes to giant ai yu jelly containers. We use our collection as background items in photo shoots, props for our cooking show, infrastructure in the studio, and reference material for the Taiwanese Vernacular Style™.
Here are a few examples, shot today:
The foundation of this collection came to me in one large gift from Mikey Chen, a Taiwanese designer and tea farmer based in Taipei, who had been collecting everyday objects made in Taiwan for years. When I first met him in 2022, he gave them all to me. I had traveled to Taichung with only a duffel bag (spoiler alert: too small).
Knowing this collection was priceless, I was determined to fit it all in, down to the last watering can. Luckily, you can buy all manner of luggage easily in Taiwan, especially late at night, and I carted it all back to Taipei in a few ga ji dai totes. I am a professional bag lady after all. Callback to the boxes of reusable totes.
Mikey will forever be part of the Yun Hai DNA, but he has a very exciting project of his own (and this is where we get to the tea, I dare you to count the words): Sensitive Creatures Lab 仃杉實驗, or S.C Lab. Under this name he develops and produces sommelier-grade tea liquors, tea wines, and sparkling teas. He calls it farm-to-bottle, because the tea starts with harvests from local Taiwanese farms.
His passion for Taiwanese production shapes the way he approaches tea: it’s one of Taiwan’s finest products, and, despite its age-old history and globally influential boba tea culture, it’s still a rich field for research and discovery.
S.C Lab took root in 2019 (similar timing to Yun Hai!), when Mikey left a tech career in the US and returned to his family’s tea farm in Shuangxi as a fourth-generation farmer. There, his uncle taught him not only how to grow tea, but also how to infuse spirits with tea leaves. Mikey saw tea wine 茶酒 as a potential Taiwanese icon, and brought in his friend Pouria Lee, an Iranian-Canadian mixologist and bar owner living in Taiwan with a talent for drink development. Together, they developed their own distillation techniques for layered tea liquors, and also created a line of non-alcoholic sparkling teas.
When I visited Mikey in 2022, S.C Lab was just getting off the ground, and I got to sample a few bottles (maybe more than a few? I can’t remember, this was before the NA one existed). Today, I’m excited to announce that we’re now distributing their non-alcoholic sparkling tea, and I agree with Mikey—it’s absolutely iconic. Read on for more info on all three flavors: Tieguanyin Iron Goddess of Mercy, Longan Flower and Osmanthus, and Guava Oriental Beauty.
Sparkling Teas by S.C Lab
S.C Lab sparkling teas are made by cold-steeping tea and botanicals in purified water for up to five days, then blended with other ingredients, like fruit, and lightly carbonated to finish. They source from farms throughout Taiwan, including their own.
Sparkling tea may be an emerging category in the world of fine non-alcoholic beverages, but it has been around in some form or another for ages, from fermented kombuchas to carbonated tea that can be found in convenience stores in Taiwan. Mikey told me that for S.C Lab, carbonation alone is not enough to make an interesting drink. Instead, they follow what they call a “five notes” philosophy when building a beverage: the aroma, the first sip, the flavor development, the finish after swallowing, and the aroma left in the glass are all considered. They “want all five stages to connect and create a melody, like the do-re-mi-fa-so in a song.”
I’ve been bringing their sparkling tea to parties, and, no lie, they have been finished before the wine. I brought a couple bottles to an influencer dinner where I was definitely the least cool person there (friend who invited me who is reading this, no need to reassure me), and these made me pop-u-lar. They are always a hit. Like a song.
Tieguanyin Sparkling Tea
This caffeinated sparkling tea begins with premium Tieguanyin 鐵觀音 (aka Iron Goddess of Mercy), hand-harvested in Muzha. S.C Lab blends both dark roast and regular roast, the former for its heavier body and the latter for its subtly floral aroma. The leaves are cold brewed and bottled using an aseptic cold filling technique, which is ideal for locking in the fragrance of the tea without chemical preservatives.
Malic acid from Fuji apple adds bright, clean acidity to the warm aroma of Tieguanyin, creating a balanced profile reminiscent of a crisp autumn day. We like to call it our grown up version of the classic Taiwanese Apple Sidra soda, but it’s closer in character to Iron Goddess of Mercy, with just a kiss of tart.
We use this to make a festive, non-alcoholic ai yu jelly punch bowl in an upcoming holiday episode of Cooking With Steam. Stay tuned!
Longan Flower and Osmanthus Sparkling Tea
To create a caffeine-free sparkling tea, the makers at S.C Lab turned to two flowers: toasted longan blossoms and hand-picked osmanthus.
Longan may be more widely known for its fruit, but the flower is also used to make a delicate honey-scented tea. S.C Lab uses an uncommon processing method for the longan flowers, which requires stir-frying them in a small amount of cane sugar. This step introduces a light caramel note to longan flower’s natural honeysuckle fragrance.
Osmanthus, a popular ingredient in desserts across Taiwan, introduces an apricot dimension to the beverage, while the bubbles keep things refreshing.
Guava Oriental Beauty Sparkling Tea
Oriental Beauty (or 東方美人 dong fang mei ren) oolong forms the base of this caffeinated sparkling tea. Beloved for its honeyed muscat notes, it was one of Taiwan’s most precious tea exports of the last century. S.C Lab sources theirs from a small-scale, third-generation farmer in Beipu, a Hakka region near Hsinchu that is known for growing this variety.
To create a layered drinking experience, they steep the tea with dried red guava from Nantou, which has a concentrated perfume flavor and gentle body.
Side note: resurfacing Lillian’s recommendation of Gold Leaf 茶金, which is all about the heyday of Oriental Beauty oolong production in Taiwan in the latter half of the 1900s. Add to watch list.
Every flavor comes in a single bottle or a set of three for a discounted price. If you’re interested in trying all the flavors in the series, check out our Taiwanese Sparkling Tea Sampler.
On Packing and Shipping
As a brand that has become an expert in the delicate art of importing and shipping glass bottles (soy sauce, sesame oils, peanut oils, hot sauces), the introduction of this sparkling tea was no small thing to figure out. It’s a larger and heavier bottle than other items we’ve shipped before. We did not want to launch liquid gold without being confident in our shipping logistics.
Officially: To ensure safe delivery, each bottle is wrapped in bubble wrap before being placed into a sturdy single or triple hexabox—a double-walled, corrugated carton specially designed for shipping wine bottles.
We didn’t experience any issues with this set up in our rigorous (and I mean rigorous) testing, but if you do, rest assured we will make it right.
Here are a few shots of the behind-the-scenes work we do here to make sure these Taiwanese products can indeed make it all the way from Taiwan to your door.
Our initial tests, in the shop. None of these methods made the cut:
A more advanced round of testing, with our warehouse, more rigorous this time (yes, we drop six times on every side).
An example of some early testing results:
Also, this? Just part of a day’s work:
Success!
Big, big gratitude to Lillian, Natya, and Zach and Emily in the warehouse for putting this through such high integrity drop testing.
P.S. One thing I love about our warehouse is the occasional “logistics poetry” we get. See below, when we asked them to check that our untreated Hinoki chopsticks were in good condition:
Too blessed to be stressed.
Before I Go…
Our plastic bottles of peanut oil are on sale! The bottle may not be our typical glass packaging, but you will be getting a better value for the same high-quality oil. Cold-pressed from Tainan No. 9 peanuts, this oil has a high smoke point, which makes it perfect for stir-frying and deep frying. I’m ordering 12, which leaves 12 remaining. Just kidding, sort of.
The Yun Hai x O.OO 2027 Lunisolar Almanac will soon arrive at our warehouse and be available for purchase! To be notified of when it drops, sign up for our waitlist.
More Taiwanese props. Photo: Amalissa Uytingco. Our Brooklyn store will be closed on Tuesday, November 3rd for maintenance before the busy holiday season begins. We’ll resume regular hours on Wednesday, November 4th.
Like a spring smell when all the snow is melting in the forest,
Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉
Written with editorial support by Amalissa Uytingco, Jasmine Huang, Lillian Lin, and Natya Regensburger. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with friends and subscribe if you haven’t already. I email once a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. For more Taiwanese food, head to yunhai.shop, follow us on instagram and twitter, or view the newsletter archives.
