When most people think about tea quality, they focus on whether it's organic or where it comes from. Those things matter, but there's another factor that separates everyday tea from truly exceptional tea, and that's when the leaves are harvested. At Cusa, we source second pluck tea for our green and black varieties, which places our tea in the top 5% of quality worldwide. If you've ever wondered why some tea tastes remarkably better than others, the timing of the harvest is a big part of the answer.
Understanding the Tea Harvest Cycle
Tea plants don't produce the same quality leaves year round. After lying dormant through winter, a tea plant wakes up in early spring and begins producing new growth. This first burst of leaves is called the first flush, and it happens roughly between late February and April depending on the region. These leaves are delicate, light, and highly prized by tea connoisseurs willing to pay premium prices for that fresh spring character.
Then comes a brief rest period before the plant enters its second growth cycle, typically from May through June. This is the second flush, also known as second pluck, and it produces tea with a distinctly different character. The leaves have had more time to mature under warmer conditions, developing deeper complexity and richer flavor profiles. While first flush gets most of the attention among collectors, second pluck tea offers something that many everyday tea drinkers actually prefer: a more robust, full-bodied cup with layers of flavor that hold up beautifully whether served hot or iced.
Why Second Pluck Qualifies as Top 5%
The designation of second pluck as top 5% quality isn't arbitrary. It reflects the reality of how most tea is produced and sold worldwide. The majority of commercial tea comes from later harvests, monsoon flushes, or autumn pickings when the plants are producing leaves rapidly but with less concentrated flavor. These later harvests yield more volume but less character, and they're what end up in most tea bags and instant tea products on grocery store shelves.
First and second flush teas together represent only a small fraction of total tea production, and second pluck specifically offers a sweet spot between the delicacy of spring tea and the accessibility that everyday drinkers want. The leaves from this harvest have developed more body and complexity while still retaining the quality markers that distinguish premium tea from commodity tea. When we say our tea collection uses top 5% quality leaves, we're talking about this specific harvest window and the care taken to select only the best from it.
The High Mountain Advantage
Harvest timing is only part of the equation. Where tea grows matters enormously, which is why we source exclusively from high mountain tea farms. Elevation affects tea in ways similar to how it affects wine grapes. At higher altitudes, cooler temperatures slow down the growth of tea leaves, giving them more time to develop complex flavor compounds. The plants also face more stress from temperature swings between day and night, which causes them to produce more of the beneficial compounds that make tea both flavorful and good for you.
We personally visit the organic tea fields we source from, and we deliberately choose smaller farms in remote valleys. This isn't just about aesthetics or marketing. Farms located away from busy roads, industrial areas, and heavy development have significantly less exposure to the airborne pollution and heavy metals that can contaminate tea grown in more accessible locations. High mountain farms in these remote areas produce cleaner tea from the start, which means less to filter out later.
From Leaf to Cup: Preserving What Makes It Special
Sourcing exceptional tea leaves is only valuable if you don't destroy their quality during processing. This is where most instant tea products fail completely. Traditional methods of making tea "instant" involve either high heat that essentially cooks the tea and destroys its delicate flavors, or freeze drying that can cause a kind of freezer burn effect on the compounds that make tea taste like tea. Either way, you end up with something that dissolves in water but tastes nothing like freshly brewed tea.
We developed our cold brew process specifically to solve this problem. Instead of using heat or extreme cold, we extract flavor using room temperature water and pressure. This gentler approach pulls out all the flavor, aroma, and beneficial compounds without damaging them. From there, we use vacuum dehydration to remove only the water, leaving behind tea crystals that dissolve instantly while tasting like they came from a proper brew. When you try our Organic Green Tea or English Breakfast, you're getting second pluck quality that actually tastes like it.
Purity You Can Trust
Even with careful sourcing and gentle processing, we don't leave purity to chance. Every batch of our tea goes through membrane filtration between brewing and dehydrating, which removes any impurities that might have made it through despite our careful sourcing. Then we test every single batch for heavy metals, pesticides, mold, and bacteria. We share these results because we believe you deserve to know exactly what you're drinking.
This level of testing might seem excessive for a tea company, but we've seen the research on what can hide in tea products that skip these steps. Heavy metals accumulate in tea leaves over time, and organic certification alone doesn't guarantee their absence. Mold and mycotoxins can develop during storage and processing. We test because we drink our own tea every day, and we want the same confidence in its purity that we're offering to you.
Quality Worth Tasting
The difference between commodity tea and second pluck tea isn't subtle once you know what to look for. Our Mango Green Tea has been our best seller for four years running, and customers consistently mention that they can actually taste the tea underneath the fruit flavor, not just sweetness masking low quality leaves. That's what happens when you start with exceptional tea and process it with care.
Whether you're a devoted tea enthusiast or someone who just wants a better cup without the fuss of brewing loose leaf, second pluck quality makes a noticeable difference. We've done the work of sourcing, testing, and preserving that quality so you can enjoy premium tea anywhere, anytime. Explore our full tea collection and taste what top 5% quality actually means.
