Tea & Collection

The lady who owns this place knows her tea and curates some really high quality leaves. She only takes cash and doesn’t speak a lot of english. So if you cannot speak Cantonese, you will still manage buying stuff here, but won’t receive a lot of info on what you’re looking at.
The ‘lower’ quality teas are still quite good (at least for my untrained palette) and are well priced, definitely better than a lot of places.

The Tea and Collector has recently acquired the 2011 Early Spring Harvest 1^st Flush Lung Ching (Dragonwell). It is considered by many a critic to be one of the best harvests ever and I rather doubt any readers are going to find a finer green tea no matter how hard they try, excepting those that know the prefect in the West Lake district of China. This is green tea at its very best and eclipses, by a long shot, what is selling at the trendy tea shops for the same price. Ten Rens has one a grade lower for slightly less money but it too does not approach the plateau of what T&C has achieved. However, it is still better than the trendy offerings.
This gem is a steal at $ 36.00 per 100 grams. If you brew gongfu style (¹⁄₃ tea leaves by volume of pot with 6 to 10 second infusions), it would be a sin to brew it any other way, a 150ml yixing tea pot will give you about 8 brews for 100 grams. Expect 4 superb infusions with each brew and at least 4 more on a downward sliding scale.
Any fermentation of green tea essentially renders it worthless but not useless. This tea has been stored and shipped properly totally away from moisture and oxygen and is virtually free of fermentation. If your tea smells more like an Oolong or Bao Zhong then it has fermented and the green taste will have been supplanted by a much much milder version of the later two teas mentioned. It’s not bad tea, it is just no longer green tea in taste nor aroma.
The first image that I formed upon determining the dry aroma was baked asparagus. Only the finest Lung Chings achieve this. The leaves were completely free of dust and radiated a wonderful emerald green. A dull but distinctly green liquor was the observation upon brewing, again perfection. If your teas appear to have tinges of orange colour it is inferior and most likely a bit fermented. The wet aroma was that of roasted chestnut and, on the palate, one could taste a delicate fresh asparagus almost instantaneously. The finish was silky and light with no bitter aftertaste whatsoever. Lower grades invariably always have a slight bitterness to them.
At most, T&C has about ten pounds of this gift from the gods. When that runs out the chances are there will be none left anywhere on the planet. Run, don’t walk. However, you will have to wait until the 24^th of June because the owners are on holiday. I intend to be there at 10 AM that day to make sure I have an opportunity to purchase much more.

In my opinion (as a lover of Chinese tea) Jenny Lam, the owner sells the best — bar none — Chinese Tea in the city. She travels to China ~ yearly and buys only the best quality teas for excellent prices. Anywhere else in town, you get lower quality tea for the same or higher prices. Even her lower-​priced teas are decent.
Jenny truly understands and loves tea. If you want to learn about tea, go and have a tea tasting and discuss the tea with her.
Cash-​only: nearest bank-​machine is the ATB on the next block.