Tea Information:
Leaf Type: White
Where to Buy: Verdant Tea
Tea Description:
After decades of innovation and working to perfect their green tea, the village of Laoshan has entered a golden age of diversity in their tea offerings. Just a year ago, our friends, the He family, started making black tea as an experimental crop, improving with each harvest. This black tea has quickly become our most popular offering. Now, for the first time, Laoshan White tea is available.
Learn more about this tea here.
Taster’s Review:
This is some of the greenest white tea I’ve ever seen! In fact, had I not read the label and opened the pouch myself, I would have sworn it was a green tea. The leaves are so tiny, deeply green, and beautiful, like the youngest of spring leaf buds eagerly waiting the day it will open and drink in those golden rays of sunlight.
Oh… how lovely. This greenish-gold liquid is heavenly to sip! It has a beautifully soft mouthfeel – like fluffy soft velvet, and the flavor is sweet and vegetative. Again, had I not known I brewed a white tea, I would think this was a green tea based upon the sip. It has a very green tea flavor to it with the vegetative tones, however, there is also a delicateness to this that suggests a white tea to me.
The tasting notes for this tea suggest a sugar snap pea taste, and I get that. It is very sweet and crisp, like the sweetest, youngest sugar snap peas that have that distinctive SNAP when you break them between your fingers. This crispy crunch to the vegetable displays the freshness of it just as the flavors here suggest the freshness of the tea.
As I continue to sip, I notice hints of a sweet nutty taste. Not so much a toasty nutty taste, though. It tastes not quite raw, but not completely roasted either… like an almond that is just slightly under-roasted. It still has that creaminess of the raw nut, very smooth … but without the bitterness of the raw almond. In fact, there is nothing bitter whatsoever about this tea. It’s purely sweet from start to finish … and as I continue to sip, and especially in the later infusions (I steeped this tea six times) I noticed a honey-esque tone emerging, tasting somewhat like the honeysuckle notes I remember from my childhood and also vaguely reminiscent of a wildflower honey.
As I mentioned, this tea is good for multiple infusions – I steeped it six times, but I think it could have endured several more! – and the flavor just keeps getting more and more interesting with each infusion. This one is a MUST TRY for white tea enthusiasts – this one is so beautiful and memorable … the kind you want to spend an entire afternoon with, because there is so much beauty locked inside these tiny, delicate leaves.
