Floating Leaves Tea

Floating Leaves sits at 1704 NW Market St in Ballard and specializes in small-batch Taiwanese tea, sourced through a community of growers and makers in Taiwan. It was created by Shiuwen, who grew up in Taiwan, where her tea life began at her uncle's tea table, and who built the house as a place where Eastern and Western ways of drinking meet over one pot. The method she teaches, which the shop calls Body Centered Tea Appreciation, came out of years spent with multi-generational tea families and tea masters there.

The catalogue is organized by roast: light oolong, roasted and vintage oolong, red oolong, and then black, puer, green and white tea with teaware alongside. Portions are deliberately small, 25 and 75 g for the oolongs and 60 g for the black teas, so a spring high-mountain oolong is a small decision: the Fragrant Dong Ding from the 2026 spring harvest is the least expensive tea on this list at 8,50 US$. Keemun Black is 11 US$ the 60 g, Jasmine Pearls 20 US$, a 40 g Sanxia Baimudan 25 US$ and a 30 g tin of Charaku matcha 27,95 US$.

The Ballard shop does not run tastings on site; the classes are held on weekends at a separate tea studio in Woodland Park, taught by Shiuwen. The rest of the team works the sourcing end year round: Noah studies charcoal roasting in Taiwan with the shop's teacher, Master Zhan, and Sunny, a high-school classmate of Shiuwen's, pays hard-to-reach farmers and handles the shipments out of Taiwan. The online store ships to United States addresses only, free above 100 US$, and keeps a separate Taiwan inventory listed for orders sent from there.