When I posted my blog on Monday, it was all there. I wonder what happened to it? I can try to recreate it for you from my tasting notes.
The two teas I tried were White Tea from Golden Moon and Upton's ZW80, China Yin Zhen, Downy White Pekoe.
Golden Moon claims they were the first company to import white teas. White teas are fairly rare, as they are almost unprocessed and usually from the finest early pickings. This particular tea has chrysanthemums in it, which I had not noticed at first, so it isn't really a test of white tea for me, as I was planning to compare 2 plain ones. Oh well. The leaves are chopped, unusual for a white tea and there is indeed, a small dried flower in them. At first the leaves almost smelled like roses, but this aroma dissipated as it brewed to a light amber, after 2 minutes at about 180 degrees. I think the color came from the chrysanthemum, as did the flavor. It was very pleasant, but if there was an additional taste from the tea itself, I could not detect it.
The Upton's sample was quite different and more what I expected form a white tea. The leaves and buds were whole, a very pale green, overlaid with the silvery hairs of newness. There wasn't a whole lot of scent, just a bit of greenness. I brewed this for 2 minutes at 180 also, using about 2 teaspoons of leaves, as they are quite fluffy. The brewed tea also did not have much aroma. The taste was a mild, soft green nutty flavor, which lingered in my mouth. I thought I would get some more as it would be so pleasant to have at night when I want some real tea, but not much caffeine.
3 comments:
Hi Marlene:
For some reason, your email address doesn't seem to be working. It's coming up as dartetten@yahoo.com and my mail says this address doesn't exist ... aren't computers just a little too smart sometimes? Anyway, let me know if this is in fact the right address and I'll figure out something from there.
Golden moon's claim about being the first company to import white teas sounds overly ambitious; I generally don't trust such claims unless they're verified by independent sources. I don't know when golden moon tea was founded; it's been around since 1999 at least.
But if you want to do some digging, you can use the internet archive to view tea company websites. Golden moon was selling white tea back in 1999, as that site verifies. But the internet archive also shows Upton tea selling white teas online in 1998.
I was pretty sure Upton's had been doing it longer. Thanks for mentioning it.
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