Yunnan Sourcing Spring 2018 Silver Needles White Tea of Feng Qing.
A straight infusion of the Jade Needles in a teapot last week proved to be a bit intense. Showing too much of the vegetal character of the tea. So, I decided I would give today’s tea a better chance to shine by brewing with a gaiwan.
Brewed in this manner, the White Tea of Feng Qing proves to be a subtle and ghostly tea. Floral and spice aromas are almost more implied than present. The vegetal character which dominated the Jade Needles is only detectable as an after taste, more present in the smell of the leaves than the tea itself.
An interesting bit of trivia, while Americans and the British tend to classify teas by the color of the leaves, in China, teas tend to be named after the color of the brewed tea liquid. That’s why we call oxidized teas “black” and the Chinese tend to call them “red”. With white teas, we call them white because of the white hairs on the leaves and the Chinese because the brewed tea liquid is nearly indistinguishable in color from plain water. In fact, while it is not uncommon for plain hot water to be served as a beverage in China, (almost all water is boiled before drinking,) sometimes this plain hot water is called “white tea”.
#WhiteTea #YunnanSourcing #Cha #Tea #tasseography