Honeysuckle White Tea

Hubby brought home a couple of vanilla beans for us to play with. I snipped off a few slivers into a second steep of this.

Even at Steep 2, the honeysuckle is so strong, I’m not sure I was getting any of the vanilla. I think can steep this same batch of leaves well into tomorrow without putting a dent in the strength.

P.S. Have any of you seen the lid to my Finum brew basket that mysteriously disappeared from my kitchen counter? It’s green.

I got a sample size of this with a very small order I placed with Shang. Actually I ordered one ounce of one kind of tea and several samplers of others. This tea smells like honeysuckle through and through. I grew up around many honeysuckle bushes and always enjoyed picking the flowers and sucking out the juices. Actually I believe we would pull the stamen from the flower – I don’t know the actual word but I know how we did it lol. Honeysuckle has a very sweet flavor sort of like honey, but not, when you do this.
This tea is relaxing, lovely, scented, and buttery. There is almost this milky mouthfeel to it.
Its an enchanting tea.
The color is gorgeous!
A very light vegetal flavor comes out in the after taste.
Slightly nutty.
The vegetal flavor mixed with the buttery milky flavor remind me of buttered green beans. Yes I put butter on my green beans, don’t you?
This tea is a sure shot for my shopping list!
Shang tea is actually only about an hour or so from my home and I hope to be able to drop in there soon to visit and sample more of their teas but for now I have several wonderful samples here to try and this one to resteep many times! :)
Happy dance!

I’ve never had honeysuckle in tea before so I wasn’t too sure what to expect.

Steeped at around 175 F for 2 minutes the liquor of this tea is a lovely golden yellow color. The aroma of the honeysuckle is not too strong and the flavor complements the white peony tea quite nicely. Quite a lovely combination really… This is slightly nutty and sweet and would be nice for a mood booster and pick me up. It could be my imagination but I feel like this is soothing my frazzled nerves a bit. I look forward to trying more of my teas from Shang (I got one of their little tea samplers).

So the boyfriend opted for the black currant bai mu dan from 52teas, but I wanted something I hadn’t tried before. I took his lead on the white though, and started looking at what I had. This is one of those samples that I don’t recall who sent to me.

Two things gives me high expectations.

1. As has been previously established, it is in my opinion nearly impossible for Shang Tea to do anything wrong. Ever. I have loved everything I’ve tried from them, even things I did not expect to love.

2. Honeysuckle. I don’t actually know anything about this or what it tastes like, but it’s got such a very attractive name.

I smelled the dry leaf before brewing and was struck by a very rough, earthy, almost grainy note which I can’t imagine could be anything other than the honeysuckle. That’s not really the sort of aroma I would expect from that name, I have to say. It reminded me a bit of sour dough. That’s not really something I find very nice I have to say, so my expectations are taken down a notch. Maybe Shang Tea can make something that doesn’t appeal to me after all.

After steeping, however, the sour dough notes are gone, and the aroma is very sweet and very honeyed. That attractive name there is beginning to show its colours. It’s also quite floral, but not super-perfumed like many flower scented teas are to me, and I can easily pick out the actual tea underneath.

It doesn’t taste like honey. It’s definitely flower-y and it’s got this sort of dusty dry flavour to it. I often get that from flower scented teas, and that’s why I’m not particularly a fan of them. Here’s it’s sort of looming in the background. Not really making itself known, but impossible to overlook. It’s the elephant in the room. Everybody knows it’s there but it’s just not talked about. Maybe it’s even slightly menacing and brooding. (I can’t tell if it’s synesthesia (mine is very mild and spotty) coming in to play here or if I’m just exhibiting a lively imagination)

Apart from that it’s quite sweet indeed, and I suppose that is the bit that has given honeysuckle its name. Although I still don’t think it really tastes of honey. It’s just sweet, but it’s not honey.If the aforementioned is the dark and brooding gentleman in the corner, glaring at the rest of the company, this note would be the lovely ladies having high tea with dainty cups, scones, clotted cream, biscuits, the lot.

There’s something quite Regency-y over this tea, actually.

It’s harder to pick out the actual tea base in the flavour than it was in the aroma. I can’t really say anything about it other than it’s there. Slightly nutty but not really making much of a spectacle of itself.

While this isn’t one I would buy for myself, I will have to see that Shang Tea has still not managed to disappoint me.

Backlogging from Sunday.

This was the biggest reason I wanted to try the Shang sampler and I had such huge hopes for this one. Wild honeysuckle grows along the roadside where I grew up and where my parents still live. I still love to walk down the road and to pick it and taste the sweet nectar.

My dad has a convertible and puts the top down when we go out somewhere in the spring and summer and I always bug him to take the back roads so I can smell all the honeysuckle blooming. It grows everywhere, even along the highways. It is one of my favorite things about spring and early summer.

So, I opened the little sampler bag and smelled a slight sweet floral scent. The wet leaves smelled of sweet hay with a floral note. The taste was sweet hay, slightly floral with a nectar note in the aftertaste. It didn’t jump out and say “Hey! It’s me, Honeysuckle!” it was very subtle, I almost had to look for it. It was a light enough floral that had I not been told it was honeysuckle I may not have guessed it was.

I had too high of expectations for this tea to live up to. I was expecting it to be similar to jasmine teas, to be able to scent and taste the floral notes and go “Yes! That is honeysuckle!” to be blown away. Unfortunately this tea is not that for me.

Even though my expectations were way too high for this, after getting past the fact that I was not going to be blown away by honeysuckle, this was a good white tea with a soft floral note added to it. It was more like the tea picked up the floral notes by growing in close proximity than actually being added to the tea, that’s how soft the floral notes are.

Made a pot of this thanks to Teafreak, who traded with me. (How are you guys bolding each other’s names?)

I’m really impressed with the way this looks. It’s like silver needle plus some sort of flat-leafed white tea, and then mixed half and half with dried honeysuckle flowers and buds.

It’s very mellow, even when brewed for a little over three minutes. It has a slightly vegetal taste, and sort of grassy also. It finishes with that white tea aftertaste that’s satisfying and mild. I can’t say that the honeysuckle taste is very strong, but it’s there and I really enjoy it. It’s more in the scent of the tea once it’s brewed. Reminds me of spring!

I find this tea to be a great way to ease into the night, it has a smooth mellow flavor with a light taste of honeysuckle combined with the smooth and light overtones of white peony. Great for 5+ steepings

This is an unusual white tea blend. In dry form, it smelled like it was blended with jasmine, but when steeped for three minutes, it turns up a beautiful gold liquor. The flavor is…interesting. On the foretaste, it’s like any white tea with a melon/nutty delivery, but then settles on a very soapy/citrusy middle. It reminded me of Lemon Pledge mixed with honey, only…y’know…not poisonous. It also had hints of marshmallow leaf. I liked it quite a bit. Certainly unusual.

I love the secound brewing of this tea, using a 3 minute brew time. It is smooth, naturally sweet, flavorful but light.

The down fall is, I find the first brewing at 4 minutes to be a bit grassy tasting, but sweet.
The third brewing is also quite good at 3 minutes.

The honeysuckle’s vanilla sweetness is the first thing you’ll notice, seconds into the first brew. It is an immensely pleasant aroma, and though it may seem that the strength of the smell will be a sign of overpowering sweetness on the tongue, the first sip is a velvet smooth sweetness. Don’t get me wrong, this tea is sweet, but it isn’t a dessert, the taste is light enough and complex enough (an attribute of Shang’s excellent white tea) that you will be interested in how the complexity develops in the following brews.

The taste is fleeting after the sip, not sticking to the tongue for undue time, and there is a nutty flavor underneath it all. This nutty flavor comes out more and more as the tea develops through the brew, but by the 4th brew, is not nearly as strong or complimented as the second.

Overall, it’s a wonderful tea when you want a treat of something sweet, and I would happily have 3 brews, but on four and beyond, the flavor loses some of its complexity.