White Crow 2018 Lincang Shoumei White Tea

Sipdown! (13 | 287)

Mastress Alita’s Sipdown Challenge (October) – “A Chinese tea”

Another poor neglected tea from an old Bitterleaf sampler that I got over three years ago. Sorry, tea. I guess at least it’s a tea that ages well? :P

This is lovely. I steeped it at a white tea temperature (185°F for me) without a second thought, where really boiling water is probably more appropriate for a pressed white tea. But I have no regrets, because it’s delicious prepared this way. Light and creamy, like a fluffy oat-y marshmallow cloud. It’s difficult to believe there’s no milk added, really. There are some gentle dried fruit notes as well that add a nice honeyed sweetness. But mostly it’s reminding me of some kind of light and delicious oat-based baked good.

Nom nom.

I’m glad I went for the full cake on this one and skipped the sample. This tea is gorgeous to look at, the contrast between the leaves making it an absolutely delight to behold. Unwrapped you can already smell the sweetness and steeped there’s nothing more glorious than the warm honeysuckle and nutty flavor that lingers on your palette.

I may need to buy a second cake to age because this one isn’t going to last very long I fear.

Had this last week. 212F, 2 min. It didn’t have as much flavor as I expected. Sweet, creamy, and soft. It was more about texture that taste for this one.

From my order during BLT’s Anniversary Sale.

It took a little while for everything to arrive because of the on going Canada Post strike, which has definitely put a major wrench in all my Black Friday(ish) period tea shopping arriving in a timely fashion…

I’m assuming what happened with this order is that Bitterleaf shipped it out in multiple boxes since there was so much teaware in this order – I say that because I’ve now received one small box of BLT stuff with a bit of teaware and some tea in it, but definitely not my whole order. So, I’m sure the other box(es) are on their way. I still couldn’t resist breaking into the tea from the order though – and so I made myself some of this at work, just drinking it grandpa style over the course of a few hours while I did some lab testing.

This was an absolutely beautiful white tea; it was so full of flavor! It offered up a really lovely bouquet of fruity notes – like drinking a bowl of fresh cut berries sprinkled with sugar. Just really sweet on top of that lovely, juicy fruit profile. I actually thought it was best, too, after the tea had been sitting in the water for a LONG period of time without being topped up/watered down with fresh, boiling water. Like, I imagine you could cook this stove top in some sugar on produce a REALLY killer fruity, intense, and just a little bit floral “white tea syrup” to use for all kinds of things.

KILLER offering from BLT.