I'm reviewing one of the last samples from a set by Oriental Leaf, sent for review (many thanks). This is described as Peony, also known as Bai Mu Dan. Often Fujian (Fuding area) pressed white teas are Shou Mei instead, made mainly from older leaves, with Bai Mu Dan a mix of buds and finer leaves. Typical processed style seems similar, between the two, but overall effect, the aspects, can vary a good bit in relation to the different material type used.
I'll keep this simple, citing their description after making notes, and writing what I think of it in those. 9 years old is a suitable amount of aging input; often 7 years is cited as a somewhat full transition level time period. It would depend on storage conditions, and the tea would keep changing later, but 7 years is long enough for a lot of the basic changes to occur, picking up depth, warming in tone, etc.
2015 Aged Second-grade White Peony White Tea Mini Cake ($6 for two 5-gram samples)
White peony tea (Bai Mu Dan), a type of white tea characterized by its large, open leaves, is typically picked in the spring when the young leaves and tea buds are most tender. Peony tea has a light, delicate flavor often described as floral or fruity and is lower than silver needle.
This tea is made with second-grade tea leaves, which are slightly lower quality than first-grade tea leaves, but at a more reasonable price. The tea has a more complex flavor and a more prolonged aftertaste.
The tea has been aged since 2015, further developing its flavor. The tea has a rich, mellow taste with notes of honey, flowers, and nuts. The aftertaste is long-lasting and refreshing.
This tea is perfect for experienced tea drinkers who appreciate the complexity and depth of flavor that comes with aging. It is also a good choice for those who enjoy the mellow taste of white tea. The caffeine content in white tea is relatively low. Different types of white tea may require different water temperatures for brewing. White peony tea can be like loose-leaf tea or compressed sheets. The quality of white tea depends on factors such as the source of the tea plants and the processing methods.
So far so good. I think that's more a myth than actual reality that white teas are lower in caffeine level, but it's not that much of a red flag that the vendor shares that. Some people still think that.
The description works, matching the tea experience. The cost seems ok, $6 for 10 grams, or 60 cents a gram, even though that's on the high side in relation to buying in higher volume. You can brew two rounds for those two tablets worth of tea, at $3 each, and it wouldn't change that much if it cost $2 instead. It's on the high side for Shou Mei, but it's not Shou Mei. Samples tend to cost a bit more per gram; it's just how that often goes. They do sell these same samples for less when you buy more of them, so you can scale up purchase amount and reduce cost, if that's of interest. It's as well to just try teas first though, to see what you make of them, before committing to buying much.
Different vendors bundling more mainstream, common types and grades into sets that are quite moderate in cost doesn't contradict all that. Here we would probably be looking for uniqueness, for an aging input making this tea more interesting than a standard white tea offering, and I'll return to whether or not that shows through in the conclusions.
Review:
#1: I gave this a nice long soak to get infusion started, about a minute. It will still probably be a bit light, since tablet or disc shapes take time to open up.
Yep, it's light. Flavor that does show through is positive, quite promising (a hint of floral tone, and a hint of cinnamon spice). Often this range of white tea forms can be too subtle, so that I tend to never buy pressed Shou Mei versions. Maybe for this being Bai Mu Dan it will include more sweetness and floral range; we'll see.
The tone for those should have warmed over 9 years, but if this was stored completely sealed in that multi-layer material sample package it might have been relatively preserved, unchanged no matter how long it spent in there. I think the transition process is different for white teas than sheng, not involving the same degree of bacteria and fungus input, actual fermentation, but I'm not sure if it can change with essentially no external air contact input.
I'll give it another minute, to make sure this gets going.
#2: thickness, sweetness, and intensity all pick up, but it's still not there yet. One more long soak may only get the tea fully wetted, so the fourth infusion may tell more of the story.
One interesting type of background enters in that people can sell aged white tea that's not really aged. How? It's easy enough for producers to let white teas oxidize more during processing, to give them a long wither (let them sit), then the color will change, and flavors will deepen, in a vaguely comparable way to what 7 to 9 years of aging would cause. Could I identify the difference? Maybe, maybe not. It would help if I'd been drinking a good bit of aged white teas over the last half dozen years, instead of very little of it. I can still describe character, and if it's quite positive, even though "artificially" achieved, then it's still quite positive.
"Real" aged white tea can still lack intensity and complexity, it seems to me. I suppose that more dried fruit range should evolve, versus a partially oxidized white tea version just increasing warm tones a little. Real aged versions should probably be a little sweeter, but when teas are subtle to begin with making that determination can be problematic.
People say that you should "use trusted sources," but then they never seem to move on to what kind of vendor profile or backstory is likely to indicate that they are trustworthy. A vendor can be very convincing and still ingenuine, or provide very limited background information and story and still be telling the truth. You need to be able to judge the tea itself, and that requires a lot of experience.
#3: in a sense this is really nice, but in another sense intensity is so low that there isn't much to experience. That's normal for a lot of white tea. If I were to say that it tastes like warm floral tones, cinnamon spice, and rich autumn leaf scent, with a mild toffee-like sweetness, that wouldn't be wrong, but it's all just so light. Some vendors would add another 3 or 4 flavor aspect descriptions, varying them over rounds, all but guaranteeing to you that flavor complexity and intensity are positive. Then the tea might still be subtle like this, expressing a hint of this or that.
Bear in mind that I'm a sheng pu'er drinker, and oolongs tend to come across as limited in intensity to me; my expectations are dialed up a bit. Acclimation can lead to that.
I'll let this brew just over a minute again, and it might show more intensity, since it's finally in the range of being fully wetted. Four minutes of total brewing time is a good bit, but while half of the tea isn't soaked through yet that part hasn't been releasing much flavor.
#4: the cinnamon evolves a bit more than the rest. This is pleasant, just still on the subtle side. You could have a comparable but more intense experience buying decent Oriental Beauty (relatively more oxidized Taiwanese oolong, that comes across as fruity, with some spice).
Since preference is always a main yardstick I can't necessarily clearly identify limited intensity as a flaw, but to me it's like that, a limitation. Of course it's possible to push the tea, to use full boiling point water, higher proportion, and a longer infusion time, and intensity will pick up. I'm brewing something like 5 or 6 grams in 100 ml gaiwan, it looks like, so using a minute for infusion time isn't as much when you consider this is using less material than I typically do (more often 8 to 10 grams, with proportion maxed out, even using much more intense types of teas).
I'll give this a two minute soak and then leave off the notes. It's fine; it's ok. People on this page for tea character would enjoy it. People getting rocked by sheng pu'er intensity most days would probably see it as a miss, more often. Even a black tea or oolong drinker could see the limited intensity as a problem, but that would just depend. It's normal for white teas though; this is in a normal range. I would have a standard Shou Mei version from 7 or so years ago stashed somewhere; I could keep going with comparison. There wouldn't be much point though; there would always be the question of just how good that version really was, if it expressed the best of the range or if it was below average.
#5: Since I hadn't ripped the pressed sheets apart even after infusing for nearly 6 minutes now the innermost layers aren't completely soaked through yet. Getting the most out of this version probably relates to messing with it, to doing that. I did just break it all apart and re-added the water, giving it two infusions with the same liquid, but brewing temperature must have dropped way off, since this has been soaking for well over two minutes.
It's slightly more intense, richer in feel, with deeper, warmer flavors showing through. It's nice.
Just how nice, though? Does it seem definitely "real," tea that actually has been around for 9 years? Is the flavor distinctive, complex, and compelling? To me it's just pleasant, none of all that. But then I don't love aged white tea that much. It always promises to deliver on deep, rich, complex, varied, sweet tones, and then when you try it it's fine, and those things are there, if you look for them, but intensity is limited, and complexity occurs across a relatively narrow range. It always seems like maybe there's a different, better example out there, that you just aren't sourcing right to find it yet.
I can go a little further with that. In 2017 I did a combined white tea tasting that didn't necessarily make sense, this one:
Comparing compressed white teas, shou mei, gong mei, and one freestyle
Those teas ranged from 2008 to 2015, so the oldest then was supposedly 9 years old, as with this one. One is Gong Mei, the style of white tea that contains even more bud content than Bai Mu Dan, if I've got that right. Probably it's not quite that simple, and there is more to typical background themes and typical style, but it works to say that both are represented as not being made from mostly older leaf material.
I've drank most of all those teas since, just not all of them. I think a chunk of the Gong Mei is at the bottom of a storage box somewhere. I use aged white tea to drink while fasting, to get a break from shu pu'er, since those two types work best on an absolutely empty stomach. I'm not sure any changed all that much in relation to aging another 7 years since, which would make the one 16 years old now, but I think it's already gone.
That older version had been kind of so-so in quality level, so the aging status is less meaningful. Maybe they were "faking" aged shou mei versions even back then, 7 years ago, and it was just more oxidized white tea, not a version that old. Who knows.
I didn't frame that as a selling point but aged white tea can be great to drink when you are sick. It has a depth to it, and sweetness, and it's quite mild and approachable, and all that fits perfectly well when you are too sick to appreciate stronger versions of teas. I would've been happy to drink this when I had the flu last week.
Or day to day preference varies; maybe just for a change sometime. I wouldn't be open to spending much on having this kind of experience; white teas like this tend to not cost all that much, and to me there isn't enough distinctive about the experience to justify that. Then again if someone had never tried decent aged white tea and wanted to that would increase the draw quite a bit, and this probably wouldn't turn up for 20 or 30 cents a gram either. It'll be interesting to see a listed price.
Conclusions:
So it's 60 cents a gram; a bit more, probably related to this being a sample, and tied to the distinctive aged version and Bai Mu Dan parts. It's fine as an experience, and fine for trying this kind of tea, but I think someone would come away from it questioning if they had the best range of this kind of experience.
What about the "second grade" part; couldn't it be better as the highest grade? Would the aging input be clearer to identify and stronger if it hadn't been quite as completely sealed from all air contact? White tea doesn't necessarily ferment, like sheng pu'er, but limited air exposure might help it transition, being stored in a cake in a wrapper that's not well-sealed.
As with trying lots of other samples lately I think this is fine for an entry into this kind of experience, but for people already further along the path this would be similar to what they've already explored, and they'd probably be interested in seeking out even more exceptional ground. Or at least an inexpensive aged Shou Mei from a Chinatown market shop, sitting all but forgotten in a basement section, would be so inexpensive that it would be worth buying 357 or so grams to have an easy to drink white tea around.
If this had "popped" just a little more, extending into dried fruit range, for example, then it might justify being a next level experience better. As it is it's fine, pleasant for this kind of thing, just a bit unremarkable.
