To help explain the categories of tea listed below imagine how an apple changes colour when cut. The same process of oxidation starts soon after tea leaves are picked, and to make a green tea the leaves are steamed or pan-fired to stop the leaves oxidising further. Oolong teas, a category of tea between green and black tea, and black teas are made by letting the leaves wither and by rubbing or rolling them to break their cell walls and quicken the oxidation process. When the desired level of oxidation is achieved the leaves are heat treated. These different levels of oxidation, as well as the type of tea plant, its environment, and processing techniques help produce the remarkable spectrum of tastes of the teas listed below.

First Flush Goomtee - The fresh green Spring shoots from the finest tea bushes give this tea its golden green colour and sweet smooth taste. Grown by natural biological methods at Goomtee Tea Estate. Drink without milk.

50g tin £5-95

Second Flush Goomtee - a wonderfully clean crisp becond Flush with a delightful floral bouquet, muscatel character and a sublime aftertaste. This exceptional tea from one of the top estates in Darjeeling should not be drunk with milk.

50g tin £5-50

Monsoon Flush Goomtee - an excellent early Monsoon Flush picked in July so it shares some of the refreshing aromatic characteristics of a Second Flush Darjeeling but with more body. It can be made with milk.

50g tin £2-95

Autumn Flush Goomtee - The final flush of the year is many Darjeeling tea lovers' favourite. Full of autumnal fruit flavours with a subtle sweetness and aroma, this tea is perfectly balanced. Best enjoyed without milk but it has the strength and colour to take a little milk if desired.

50g tin £4-50

Deep Darjeeling - An alternative to our lighter Second Flush is this strong Second Flush also from Goomtee Tea Estate has a deep flavour and colour which allows milk to be added if required.

50g tin £3-95

Goomtee Tea Estate on a misty Monsoon morning

Goomtee is a friendly, family-run estate. It is consistently ranked among the top five Darjeeling tea estates at the Kolkata auctions where buyers from Japan, Germany, and America compete for the finest Darjeeling teas. Goomtee is also well-known for its exemplary environmental and worker welfare practices which are regularly audited by independent international organisations like Fairtrade and IMO. Ashok Kumar, the third generation owner of Goomtee, has selected the best of each seasonal flush for Postcard Teas so you can savour the changing seasons of the Himalayas in your cup.

Tea Pickers walking home on the road to Jorhat in Assam

Golden Assam - Golden Assam is a Second Flush Assam from the Mangalam Tea Estate prized for its spectacularly beautiful appearance and full flavour. The golden tips from which make the tea so special were picked during the prime Second Flush period and give the tea its smooth balanced aftertaste and honey aroma.

50g tin £7-50

Garam Assam Chai - "Garam Chai" "Hot Tea" is the cry of street tea sellers across India. This tea evokes the sweet spicy taste of their chai. It includes cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, cloves, bay leaves and a fine tea grown by natural biological methods at the Sewpur Tea Estate in Assam.

50g tin £3-95

Pu-Erh 1992 - Although strictly not a black tea, this tea from Yunnan in China is "after-fermented" by a secret microbial method over several years to give the tea a rich earthy taste and a beautiful red colour in the cup. Aged Pu-Erh teas are highly prized and some vintages from the last hundred years can sell for amazing prices.

50g pack £8-50

Best Breakfast - A strong rich breakfast blend of the world's finest black teas from some of the best tea estates in India and Sri Lanka. Blended to go well with milk.

50g tin £3-95

Island Breakfast - Island Breakfast is a special blend of Sri Lankan tea from the foothills of the Sinharaja Rainforest and an exquisite oolong tea from the mountainous island of Taiwan. Its sweet fruity flavour is delicious any time of the day and can be enjoyed with or without milk.

50g tin £4-50

Mountain Grey - An exceptional blend of high-grown teas from Uva and Darjeeling scented with oil from Bergamot fruit grown by natural biological methods.

50g tin £4-50

Big Smoke - A very special blend of black tea smoked over cinnamon wood at Handunugoda Estate, together with a fine high-grown Darjeeling tea. Both teas were grown by natural biological methods. Sweet and smoky!

50g tin £3-95

A tea flower

Tea Flower Tea - The tea plant is a type of camellia which produces beautiful white flowers when in bloom. Tea Flower Tea is a blend of these flowers and tea leaves carefully selected at Handunugoda Tea Estate to create a clean refreshing cup of tea with a touch of maltiness.

50g tin £3-95

Cinnamon Tea - A comforting blend of black tea and cinnamon from Handunugoda where cinnamon trees border verdant fields of tea. Cinnamon is indigenous to Sri Lanka and the search for the source of this sweet woody spice was one of the main motivations behind the voyages of European explorers in the 15th and 16th centuries.

50g tin £3-95

Ginger & Clove Tea - A warming spicy blend of Handunugoda tea with ginger and cloves that combine to give the tea its kick. Both spices have long histories of use especially amongst the Chinese whose Imperial courtiers would keep cloves in their mouths to freshen their breath when addressing the Emperor.

50g tin £3-95

A happy afternoon at Handunugoda

Handunugoda is a small tea estate near Galle in the south of Sri Lanka. Its owner, Malinga Herman Gunaratne, worked for foreign tea companies and as Regional Manager of the country's most famous tea area, Nuwara Eliya, before returning to produce innovative teas on his family's land. Handunugoda is less than a mile from the Indian Ocean and although the estate and its employees thankfully escaped the Tsunami's devastation, all had friends or relatives killed in the catastrophe. Herman has helped by employing some of those too traumatized to return to living by the sea and by providing new boats and motors for the local fishermen. Postcard Teas supports these efforts and contributes $2 per kilo of tea we buy from the estate towards rebuilding livelihoods in these communities. We are also helping financially with improvements to the workers' housing at Handunugoda.

Amber Oolong - A delicious dark oolong from northern Taiwan with a distinctive flavour that reminds some of dark chocolate and others of liquorice. It is roasted and aged for flavour, both processes also reduce this tea's caffeine content.

50g pack £4-50

White Tip Oolong - White Tip is another Taiwanese dark oolong. It is lighter and fruitier than the Amber Oolong with a sweet orangey flavour.

50g pack £5-00

Jade Oolong - A rolled green oolong from the mountainous central part of Taiwan. It has a delicate floral fragrance and a superb natural sweetness.

50g pack £6-00

Pouchong - A wonderful green oolong with a citrus-like tang. This very lightly oxidized tea comes from the mountains around Pin-Lin in the north of Taiwan.

50g pack £6-00

Himalayan Oolong - A remarkable golden oolong from the Goomtee Tea Estate in the foothills of the Himalayas. The silver-tipped leaves produce a smooth, fruity tea with a rare sweetness similar to that of the White Tip Oolong.

50g tin £4-95

Skilful hands making Long Jing in Mei Jia Wu village

Aoki Green - A refreshing sweet green tea from the south of Japan. Produced with their own organic fertilizers, this tea is a labour of love for Mr Aoki and his son Tak.

50g tin £7-50

Long Jing - A fine example of China's greatest green tea. This one is an early-picked single estate Long Jing from the West Lake area. It has a delightful light chestnut aroma and taste together with a special sweetness.

50g pack £9-00

Green Jasmine - An exceptional Jasmine tea from Fujian. A teamaster friend supervises the production of this tea every summer using a single estate green tea and eight times the tea's weight in fresh jasmine flowers which are later removed.

50g pack £4-50

Karigane - An intense almost fizzy green tea from Uji which is regarded as the premier place for green tea production in Japan. It is a mix of the stems and leaves of Gyokuro, the highest grade of Japanese tea.

50g pack £9-50

Blue skies and green tea fields in the Wazuka hills

Sencha - A classic Japanese green tea from the Wazuka hills of Uji. It has a beautifully balanced bitter-sweet grassy taste - a tribute to the skills of Hidekazu who blends this tea, Genmaicha, and Karigane.

50g pack £6-00

Guricha - A light sweet green tea from the beautiful hot spring town of Ureshino in Kyushu, the southern island of Japan. It is a delicious everyday green tea.

50g pack £4-00

Genmaicha - A popular Japanese green tea with roasted rice some which have popped like popcorn and give it a slightly nutty flavour. Genmaicha is thought to have originated among Japanese farmers who added roasted rice to make the precious tea go further.

50g pack £4-00

Kuki-Hojicha - A lightly roasted tea made from green tea stalks and leaves. Kuki-Hojicha is made in Shizuoka, one of Japan's great tea producing areas. It has an amber colour, a delicious smoky hay like taste, and is very low in caffeine.

50g pack £5-00

Nokcha - A special Korean tea grown without using modern agrochemicals on an estate where wild flowers flourish between the rows of tea bushes. It has a unique sweet biscuit-like taste.

50g pack £6-50

Sparrow's Tongue - An early hand picked green tea from the same estate as Nokcha. A tea of extraordinary quality, complexity and smoothness.

50g pack £14-00

Happiness is making and drinking Nokcha

Snow Jewel - A rare Chinese white tea made from silver leaf buds of a wild tea variety just before they open. This light tea from Zhejiang has a delicate flavour reminiscent of pears.

50g pack £12-00

Moonlight White - A wonderful white tea from Doke Tea Estate in Bihar state, the birthplace of The Buddha. This delicate white tea has a delicious sweet grassy taste.

50g tin £6-50

Sobacha - A sweet nutty roasted buckwheat drink from the Japanese Alps. Buckwheat contains rutin believed to improve circulation and lower blood pressure.

75g pack £3-50

Coffee Blossom Tea - the world's first Coffee Tea!

While revisiting Handunugoda Tea Estate in the south of Sri Lanka last summer I came across a coffee bush in full bloom and was overwhelmed by the amazing aroma of the white blossoms. Knowing how jasmine flowers are used to scent tea, I thought it would be interesting to try the same process with coffee flowers so I talked to Herman Gunaratne whose family have been growing tea and cinnamon at Handunugoda for over a hundred years about making this innovative tea.

Delighted by the sweetness and aroma of our first samples, we decided to start limited hand-production of the tea when the blossom became available which is not often as coffee bushes flower for a day or two just twice a year. The coffee blossom contains caffeine and as some of the flowers used to scent the tea are left in the tea, it may be the first time caffeine from both plants can be enjoyed without simply mixing tea and coffee together like they do in the wonderfully sweet milky "Yin-Yang" teas of Hong Kong.

Two types of Coffee Blossom Tea are being hand-produced. Coffee Blossom White Tea is made with a wonderful Silver Needle type white tea and has its own unique sweet flavour and floral fragrance similar to Stephanotis and Jasmine. This tea, comparable to the finest Chinese scented teas, is what I imagined when I had the idea for the Coffee Tea. Coffee Blossom Black Tea on the other hand is a made with a black tea and has a more rose aroma and a refreshing rosehip-like citric astringency. It can be drunk with or without milk while the Coffee Blossom White Tea is best enjoyed without milk. Like other teas from Handunugoda, both are produced without pesticides as the birds that live in the estate's shade trees eat most of the insects harmful to the tea bushes.

Postcard Teas will be selling the initial small hand-production of Coffee Blossom Tea in a special limited edition commemorative tin containing 15g of each type of tea. It costs £9-95 and can be bought at the store or ordered by telephone for the same price plus postage and packaging to anywhere in the world.

15g tin £9-95