Sandry Law

Sandry Law first tasted young shēng pǔ'ěr in a Guangzhou tea market in 2011. It was still bitter, still alive, and it rearranged his plans. By 2014 he had moved to Yunnan permanently, a decision he describes as inevitable once the province's red earth got under his fingernails.

His formal training began under Zhou Wei, a Mengku-based tea maker who insisted that procurement begins in the field, not at the tasting table. Zhou taught him to read leaf maturity by touch, to smell the drainage line of a fermentation pile, and to treat every village's harvest as a singular event. Those lessons anchor the way Sandry selects everything that ends up in a tea.taxi parcel.

The sourcing radius is broad but traceable. In Xishuangbanna, he works with family-run workshops in Nannuo Mountain for honey-fragrant dà shù material; in Lincang, a cooperative near the Lancang River supplies the bright-bodied shēng pǔ'ěr that appears in tea.taxi's weekly rotation. He has a standing relationship with the Menghai Tea Factory, not for branded cakes but for a small-plot shú pǔ'ěr fermented in their 1980s-built cellars — a tea he reserves for the brewing emergency kit, where its earthy immediacy matters. For the corporate tea station delivery, he sources a Yunnan black from Fengqing — Diān Hóng (滇红) — that stays steady across a thermos, plus a green from the Simao prefecture that drinks clean without a gaiwan.

Quality control is the second half of his title, and it is granular. Each prospective lot goes through a five-pass evaluation: dry-leaf inspection under natural light, a flash rinse to judge wet-leaf aroma, then three consecutive infusions timed to the second. Tasting notes are logged against weather data from the harvest season and compared with a reference sample from the same mountain in the prior year. If a batch drifts — a whisper of smoke, a faint cardboard note in the empty cup — it is returned, not discounted. tea.taxi operates on impulse trust; Sandry’s job is to ensure that trust is never misplaced.

His three offered services on tea.taxi are tightly linked to his sourcing experience. The corporate tea station delivery + setup began as a favour for a Kunming start-up that needed decent tea in a cramped kitchen. Sandry designed a compact station — a variable-temperature kettle, pre-weighed sachets of white tea and shú pǔ'ěr, and a one-page brewing card — and the model now replicates across multiple Russian cities. Each station relies on teas he personally selected, because office drinkers rarely complain but never forget a stale cup.

The brewing emergency kit is a travel-sized response to bad hotel tea. A 100g vacuum-sealed pack of shēng pǔ'ěr from Jingmai or a Bái Háo Yín Zhēn (白毫银针) from Fuding (sourced via his colleague Chen Hui Yi), a portable porcelain gaiwan, and a handful of quick-brew filters fit into a slim box that arrives before check-in. It is procurement translated into a single session: no ceremony, just good leaf and hot water.

The hotel tea concierge — guest delivery is a newer offering, born from a partnership with a Yunnan boutique hotel group. Guests select from a curated list that changes with the seasons; Sandry arranges delivery from the nearest tea.taxi hub within ninety minutes. It turns a hotel room into a temporary tea house, and the demand has surprised even him.

Outside of tea.taxi, Sandry’s tasting notes appear weekly on puerh.app, where he documents aged shēng pǔ'ěr from his private archive — a 1997 Yiwu brick, a 2005 Liming factory cake — always with the same restraint he applies to procurement. He also teaches a module on Yunnan sourcing rotations for tea.school, walking students through the calendar of pre-Qingming green, spring máochá, and autumn black tea. The throughline is the same: understand the land, and the tea will speak for itself.

He still travels the mountains each March to shake hands with the farmers who dry tea on bamboo mats behind their houses. The Kunming apartment he keeps is half archive, half cupping station, with shelves of numbered jars that hold reference samples going back eight years. For someone who delivers tea by the 100g portion, his frame of reference is quietly enormous.