How I made white tea from old bushes the first time by myself…
A few days ago I posted about one of my selfmade white teas made from Long Jing material. Today I want to show you the actual first white tea I made, a Yancha which was fully processed in my hotel room in Wuyishan 😁🙈
In total it was only 5g of dried leaves which I picked from old bushes (prob. Shuixian) after the last days of the picking season! As the bushes already had been picked I only collected small side shoots, mostly a bud and a leaf!
…and dried the Leaves in my hotel rooM.
After some initial sun withering I dried the leafs in the hotel room in a paper bag on top of a dehumidifier 😂 but I must say the result looks amazing! The oxidation is already quite strong for a white tea but produced and amazing range of colors!
Did anyone of you ever tried to make their own white tea? It’s quite easy I think 😁
Brewing the tea
I used all I had (around 5g) of the white Yancha and brewed it in my favorite Gaiwan of these days 😁 the tea is so voluminous that it filled it entirely! I first started with a modest ~80 degrees Celsius for about 40 seconds! Even though the oxidation level seemed already quite high it resulted in a light and clean liquor! My first impression was pure sweetness with nice mouthfeel, very balsamic. The second sip already revealed spicier notes, reminding more of a strong honey or so! But without any off-taste or astringency. As soon as I started to push the tea more and more with every infusion, the flavor got more complex and bold. It took me some time to figure out what it was tasting like, but eventually I realized it was quite clearly the taste of mead, medieval honey wine. There were some kind of slightly aggressive notes reminding me of alcohol and a very ripe sweetness paired with a slight spicyness. First I thought hm reminds me of Rou Gui but probably it’s rather a Shui Xian!
Pushing the tea by pouring almost boiling water over. It
White tea is probably the tea which feels most natural to me. This one especially cause I made everything myself, so I know how passive the processing was. After more and more infusions it reminded me faintly of a wild Yunnan white tea I had the last years quite regular, this Yancha material created a similar dense-ness or soupy-ness! But with the higher temperature a more ripe and slightly aggressive fermented layer is coming to the foreground, which made me really think that this tea tastes almost like mead; all in all a really fun experiment, also loved the look and feel of the wet leaves, just seemed very natural again!
