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Infusions
TAIWAN
Milk Oolong
Sourced from the rolling mountains of Taitung province, Southern Taiwan. This Oolong is from a rare varietal that is renowned for its unique, creamy softness and milky aromas. It is this characteristic that gives this tea the name Milk Oolong.
"The temperature was up in the 40s and my shirt felt like a fur coat. Wei, the young farmer, tall, bashful and funny, showed me around. I imagine he is funny, although he didn’t speak a single word of English he laughed a good deal. His friend David translated for him. One of the barriers to export for farmers is finding a market and then communicating with that market. Farmers around the world are finding ways, at least this generation is.
Over long afternoons I spent hours on the farm watching the production. Blunt fingered experts bound and unbound the leaves in muslin cloths; twisted them into tight bundles; pressed them between rolling iron plates; untwisted the cloth and released the leaves into drying machines; transferred the leaves to roasters; laid them out to dry; bound them again; rolled them; roasted them; exposed them, in an intricate dance that seemed to have no formal pattern.
The precise semi- oxidisation of the leaf, to reveal its most subtle, nuanced flavours was all done by smell and touch and feel. There was no measurement or timing, instead, the craft was instinctive understanding. Sometimes the tea went into the roasters for 20 seconds, sometimes 2 minutes. Sometimes the tea was laid out for days and sometimes for hours. All this was done by men who spent the spring season making tea and the summer and winter practising other trades: carpentry, engineering, farming on their own plots of land with other crops. The little plots of land are bound together; not just by their overlapping crops, but their skills and the manpower. One month a farmer might be cutting pineapples, the next picking and crafting tea. This was Pharaoh Sander’s playing intricately glorious free jazz, rather than the Royal Philharmonic orchestra playing from sheet music."
Oolongs lie in a category between green and black teas, occasionally called a blue tea. They are delicately crafted to the point where they reflect these two very different categories of tea and reveal their hidden subtleties.
According to legend, this oolong’s milkiness is the result of a sudden change in temperature during harvest time that occurs very infrequently.
The first time this temperature shift occurred was hundreds of years ago at a time when the moon fell in love with a comet as it was passing through the night sky. The comet passed by and then burned out and disappeared. The moon, in her sorrow, caused a great wind to blow through the valleys and hills, creating a sudden drop in temperature. The following morning, the tea harvesters went out to collect the fresh leaves and when the tea was processed, to their surprise, it had developed a unique milky characteristic, which they attributed to the motherly nature of the moon.
Shipping Information
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IOSS for EU Orders
Rare Tea Company uses IOSS (Import One Stop Shop) for EU orders placed on the website.
How IOSS works and how it is applied on the website.
The IOSS scheme allows us to collect VAT during checkout on your behalf, meaning that no VAT is due when your order is assessed by your local authority.
- If the combined value of the products in your cart are equal to or below €150 (excluding tax), VAT will be included at the point of sale and you should not be charged any fees when your order arrives.*
- Once the €150 threshold is exceeded VAT will be removed from the items in your cart and from this point onwards when your order ships you will be liable for local VAT, duties and import fees.**
To avoid unnecessary import charges, keep your orders under €150 (excluding tax and shipping). Tax is included on all applicable products at Rare Tea - if your order is applicable for IOSS tax will be shown at the checkout.
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Your order confirmation and shipping confirmation emails will also confirm whether your order is valid for IOSS.
As with all complex shipping methods, the IOSS system isn't foolproof, and orders that are valid for IOSS are occasionally incorrectly charged VAT by customs.
If an order shipped via IOSS and that you have paid VAT on does get incorrectly assessed by customs, please don't worry. It's usually just a mistake that can be fixed by contacting customs and explaining that the order shipped via IOSS with VAT already paid.
If this does happen to you then we suggest the following:
- Please contact us before speaking to customs.
- We will double check that the order was valid for IOSS.
- We will provide a VAT receipt and a shipping label as evidence.
- Contact your local customs for assistance, using the shipping label as evidence.
- If all else fails we will attempt to get our shipping provider to investigate, but this process can take a while.
*Please note - this does not include any applicable duty charged when the item is cleared. Within the EU tea is free from duty, but your region might have a different rules for non-tea items such as tins and teaware. Any duty charged is payable by you, the customer before delivery via your local customs authority.
**In special cases where custom fees have been unexpected we have retroactively refunded these in select cases. As of the 15th February 2023 (the start of IOSS) we have discontinued this process.
What is IOSS?
The Import One-Stop Shop (IOSS) is the electronic portal businesses can use since 1 July 2021 to comply with their VAT e-commerce obligations on distance sales of imported goods.
Up until the 1st July 2021, no import VAT has to be paid for commercial goods of a value up to EUR 22. New VAT eCommerce rules abolished this provision as of 1st July 2021. Thus, from 1 July 2021, all commercial goods imported into the EU from a third country or third territory is subject to VAT irrespective of their value.
What is IOSS for?
IOSS allows suppliers and electronic interfaces selling imported goods to buyers in the EU to collect, declare and pay the VAT to the tax authorities, instead of making the buyer pay the VAT at the moment the goods are imported into the EU as it was previously the case (for products over 22 EUR).
What are the advantages of IOSS?
IOSS facilitates the collection, declaration and payment of VAT for sellers making distance sales of imported goods to buyers in the EU. The IOSS also makes the process easier for the buyer, who is only charged at the time of purchase, and therefore does not face any surprise fees when the goods are delivered. If the seller is not registered in the IOSS, the buyer has to pay the VAT and usually a customs clearance fee charged by the transporter.
What countries does IOSS apply to?
IOSS applies to the EU member states of Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Republic of Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden.
It does not apply to the EEA.
How much tax will I get charged?
Tax will be charged at the base VAT rate of the shipping country.
Full details of IOSS can be found on the European Comission website.
Any questions? Please get in touch!
Send us a message using the form below, or call +44 (0) 207 681 0115 (9am - 5pm GMT, Monday - Friday).
