Korean Wild Black Tea
Hadong, Korea · Wild leaf · Final batch of 2025
Nine roasts.
Three days.
Twenty-five tins.
This tea was not manufactured. It was worked. Wild leaf picked off a Korean mountainside, then roasted by hand in a wood-fired iron cauldron nine separate times across three full days. One man did all of it.
20 g · 2 g a session · more than five infusions · under CHF 1 a cup
What nine roasts look like
The same leaf after each pass over the cauldron. Green to black across three days — no dye, no blending, just water leaving.
The first three take out water. The last three take out the sharpness.
The leaf goes into a gamasot — a wood-fired iron cauldron — and Master Shin Gwang-su turns it with bare hands until the water leaves. Then it is rolled, rested, and it goes back in. Nine times, across three full days. The middle three set the shape and burn off the grass. Machines do this once.
It was never planted
Korean wild tea grows from seed dropped on a mountainside, among the trees and bamboo, roots pushing down for water nobody brings it. Not in rows, not irrigated, not picked on a calendar. The leaf comes out smaller and slower, and there is never very much of it — which is why almost none of it ever leaves Korea. Nobody decides how much exists. The mountain does.
19:00
Boil, then wait90 °C, not boiling. The waiting is the point.
19:01
Smell it firstThe smell reaches you before the tea does. Nine roasts is why.
19:02
Two grams, 45 sRoasted chestnut, dried date, a long sweet finish.
19:03
Sit down for itOne cup — and five more infusions in the same leaf.
19:05
Start the eveningWhatever you do next, you do it on the other side of a line.
The maker
One of fewer than fifty
Shin Gwang-su is a government-certified tea artisan — 명인 — in a country that has designated fewer than fifty of them. His garden sits in the Hadong highlands and has not been treated with a chemical in forty years. He roasts every batch himself, by hand, for three days at a stretch. There is no second shift and no second line.
Machines do this once. He does it nine times, and stands over every one of them.
Shane · Certified tea sommelier · Zurich
Specification
- Leaf
- Wild, seed-grown — not cultivated
- Origin
- Hadong County, Korean highlands
- Category
- Balhyocha 발효차 — oxidised
- Maker
- Master Shin Gwang-su, 명인
- Process
- Nine hand-roasts · three days
- Cultivation
- No chemicals, 40 years · organic
- Brewing
- 2 g · 90 °C · 45 s first infusion
- Infusions
- More than five from the same leaf
- Per tin
- Ten sessions · roughly fifty cups
What happens if you wait
Twenty-five tins. There is no second run of this batch and no waiting list, because there would be nothing to put on it. The next chance is autumn 2026, if the mountain gives enough leaf — and it will not be the same tea. Wild leaf and a wood fire never repeat a year.