M a o

J i a n

The misty, cloudy climate of the mountainous Xinyang area of Henan Province, China produces this popular green tea. This tea was harvested in late April 2022, both grown and hand processed in small batches by Duan and his family. Mao Jian literally translates to "hair tips", referring to the fine furry appearance of the inner side of the tea leaf. Enjoy a fresh floral aroma with a subtle umami aftertaste in the cup.

Henan, China is a province located in central China, known for its rich cultural history and diverse tea-growing regions. While not as famous as provinces like Fujian or Yunnan, Henan has a long tradition of tea cultivation and offers several high-quality teas. The province's climate, with its warm, humid summers and mild winters, provides an excellent environment for growing tea. Henan's tea-growing areas are located mostly in the mountainous regions, which offer fertile soil and ideal conditions for tea plants to thrive.

This tea offers a gentler option for those seeking the comforting warmth and taste of tea without a pronounced caffeine boost. While naturally much lower in caffeine than traditional black or green teas, decaf varieties still preserve the soothing aromas and subtle flavors that tea is known for. Whether sipped in the early morning or enjoyed as a mellow evening indulgence, decaf tea provides an easygoing alternative that allows tea lovers to savor familiar comforts at any time of day. With each cup, you can relish the same beloved qualities of tea—aroma, ritual, and gentle satisfaction—while keeping caffeine intake to a minimum.

Hand-Rolled, Dried

This process rooted in precision and tradition. Each leaf is shaped by hand, developing rich complexity before being fired to enhance depth and lock in its character. The final drying stage refines the profile, bringing out a balance of toasted warmth, subtle florals, and a touch of earthiness. It’s craftsmanship you can taste—structured, expressive, and deeply satisfying.

Chinese green teas tend to be softer, sweeter, and less astringent than Japanese green teas due to their pan-firing process, which preserves their natural sweetness and adds a light toastiness.

401 BOXES

Our year-round rigorous sourcing allows us to have an evergreen blend with a flavor profile of high quality while retaining our commitment to seasonal coffees. This amount of cupping and blending takes a considerable amount of time, but we think it makes the difference and is a system we use for all our blends.

Duan’s Family Farm
Duan grew up on tea farms and has been involved with tea growing & production for his entire life. He is one of the most prolific & enthusiastic tea producers, and our sourcing partner has worked with him for over a decade.

Through the years, Duan has pioneered many organic farming initiatives, curated his own small production facility, and forged partnerships with producers and farmers all around Henan, China. Today, he owns several of his own tea gardens.

Duan handles the entire exclusive production of this mao jian tea in his very own production facility. Each batch is produced in very small quantities, and Duan’s entire family is involved in the processing from start to finish. They are incredibly passionate about preparing unique, artisanal teas.

We love that Duan is always experimenting, constantly finding new ways to produce teas, all by hand. He is always extremely excited to share new teas that he’s working on and is beyond grateful for the opportunity to get his artistic handiwork out to the world!

MAO JIAN TEA
This tea has a history of more than 2300 years of production in the mountainous Xinyang area of China. It is famous, ancient, and wildly popular as a relaxing tea to enjoy after a long day. The tea trees are planted at high altitudes where they can experience all four reasons and abundant rainfall. These factors contribute to rich and fertile soil composition to produce high quality green tea. The traditional harvest season for Mao Jian tea is in spring and fall, and this lot was harvested in mid-April 2022 which is an earlier picking period before the solar term. These leaves are highly coveted and particularly known for being fresh, rare, and of excellent quality in this season.

ABOUT THE SACHETS
The pyramid tea sachets are designed to give the tea leaves ample room to unfurl & expand as they steep. These sachets are made from PLA Mesh (NeoSoilon®) material that is derived from 100% non-GMO sugar cane. Each sachet is pre-dosed so you can enjoy a great cup of tea at your convenience.

Green Cost

The price here reflects not only the labor of growing and cultivating the tea, but also the respective farm’s years of skilled handling, quality of regional cultivars, and oftentimes processing work that may include milling, drying, steaming, oxidation process, and more. We partner with friends like Savoy Tea Company to identify quality teas, where within we seek to uphold transparency and quality. Due to the varying weights of each type of tea, at this time, we are listing the rough cost for each tea box.

This tea was purchased at $220 per kilogram.

Transportation Cost

This number represents the cost incurred while the tea was moved from the producing country to Onyx Coffee Lab in Arkansas. The price listed below is the cost we incurred per box of tea via designated express micro-lot shipping by air transport. It varies for each tea based on the overall volume and density of the shipment.

The air transport rate was $50/kg.

Production Cost

The following list includes many of the costs associated with producing this tea. We have always maintained transparency as a principle but have often lumped these things under the label of “production costs” in the past without going into detail.

There is an inherent difference in handling tea versus coffee, where most teas are fully processed at a processing facility in the region or at the tea farm itself. There is intensely skilled labor that comes with the drying, oxidation, rolling, steaming and packing processes. Tea is also physically very delicate, and extra care is taken in handling each dried leaf or bud to maintain the structural integrity of tea.

While the following list isn’t exhaustive, hopefully, it gives you a picture of the work, expense, and investment involved in executing tea at the level that we do. At this time we are listing our cost of production for each pound of tea at around $3.40. There are obviously many other aspects of running a business such as breakage, mistakes, new equipment and maintenance, but this works as an arbitrary cost associated with making one box of tea.

Fixed Costs
These are costs associated with simply having a business. Things like utilities of internet, natural gas, phones, rent, business licenses, fees, etc. These things increase every year. For example, most commercial leases increase by 2% every year. We periodically look at these costs and try to reduce expenses, but work in this area are small moves of the needle as these are mostly the same and usually increase every year.

Packaging
This is all the things that go into packaging the tea to get it safely to your home. There’s the biodegradable bag, the recyclable box, the compostable mailer, different boxes for bulk shipping, the paper that pads the tea, tape, and a few odds and ends. (Read about our new retail packaging HERE). These costs are separate from the tea, but a part of the cost of producing tea that is packed well and ready to ship and consume. We want our teas to arrive in a secure fashion, looking like it did when it left Onyx: with style and design but also keeping the environment in mind. Shipping packages inevitably have waste associated and we’re working towards sustainability at each step.

Labor
At Onyx, we work to make jobs both sustainable and celebrated, and we pay salaries, provide health insurance, and give regular raises to our staff. Often we have a handful of staff that get celebrated, but everyone on our team contributes and is valuable. Likewise, we wish to pay our tea partner, Savoy Tea Co, for all their skilled labor in tea handling (from hand massaging oils to create phenomenal Earl Grey or the careful packaging of each tea box). Onyx is not just a brand or a design or a café, we are truly made by every person we work with.

We all know it takes work to make anything. Savoy’s sourcing approach echoes our own, which has more labor involved than you may think. Because we visit every Relationship Coffee producer, that means our green buying team of Jon and Dakota typically spend a total of six months traveling. We’re committed to visiting and cupping on the ground, this inevitably is an investment of time, of money, of long layovers, of encountering government coupes and protests, and forging some of the greatest friendships and seeing some of the most beautiful landscapes imaginable. We appreciate that in working with the Savoy Tea team, Bill and Kyle, put equal dedication into sourcing these teas.

We have a creative team that helps create all things visible, digital, and print. These folks are very talented and have really helped push the dream of Onyx to the next level. We believe that tea can inherently be great, but having something that looks and feels good helps inform expectations, helps bring value, and tells the stories in this way has tangible and important value.

These are a few of the jobs we feel really have more involvement than might be imagined, but throughout Onyx there are touch points of intentionally positioned team members to help create the best possible beverage experiences.

Taxes
We all know what this is. We set aside and submit money every quarter for taxes along with paying all of the weekly and monthly taxes we are obligated to pay. This can be tough for a small business as there are ebbs and flows in cash flow, and taxes are often not paid in conjunction with the sales season.

Lot Size

Lot size informs us of one thing: the size of that lot. Forming a single farm lot can often take just as much labor and experience as the large regional blends, depending on the level of labor or quality standards applied to each day or week’s pickings.

A great example of this would be matcha powder, which is often a carefully constructed sum of processed green teas that are often grown in different sections of a farm to create a balanced and intentional matcha experience. It may be built up of many different farms. This often signifies that the lot was built to reflect the flavor characteristics or unique cultivars of the region. Meanwhile, a larger lot size of a Yunnan black tea may end up being used in a variety of different teas, based on the final processing and any additional treatments before packaging.