Absolute Tea

White Tea History Bits

White tea was the first ever consumed in ancient China, which makes its history the longest and the truest of any tea. Of course, the white tea of ancient times and the white tea of today are slightly different due to the discovery of better refining methods. Overall though, white tea has changed little and is hardly processed at all.

To help you get a sense of what the processing of tea is like you should visit this page by Special Teas. You may have to scroll down, but on the page you will find an excellent graph of how each tea is made from the Camellia Sinensis leaves. The graph will clearly show you that white tea is as pure as the leaves it comes from.


A Better Way

Something I realized while writing the Bit O’ History post for black tea was that it is a lot of work. It took me awhile to find what I wanted to tell about and when I did find information on the sites I stopped at they had way more information then I had time to sift through. So I think I’m going to cut back on giving history of teas.

Don’t get me wrong here, I love talking about tea history and anything tea, but I just can’t spare the time being a busy college student that I am. It’s kind of sad to me because I feel that my assembling of tea history was important work – no one else put that much time into a wide set of details and overall comprehensiveness of tea.

So to in order to solve this dilemma I’ve decided to provide a best of both worlds and use the technology of blogs (or rather their best features) to deliver the history I want people to know. Instead of giving lengthy exposition I’ll just say a few small details and give links to where you can look up the important history. So really it will just be an assembled group of sites where you can find the best information like the medium of blogging is best suited for.


The Bits

After some scouring of tea sites, I found a great page for white tea history. It has pretty much everything you would want to know about how white tea came to be. You can check it out at Tea Muse, a monthly news letter from Adagio Teas.

The article name is: White Tea: Culmination of Elegance

Another good place to look for white tea history is at Wikipedia. The site doesn’t really have much information to look at right now but it does provide a great place to see where white tea comes from. Just type in white tea at the start page or click on the link here. If you scroll down further you can find many other links to info on white tea as well as tea in general.

If you want some history on the tea I reviewed on Monday you can check out this site. It doesn’t have a lot of info but it does do a good job with specifics of White Peony tea.


Personal History with White Tea

The first time I ever tried a white tea was in fact, Monday. I’ve known about white tea for a long time, but just never got around to trying one. I’ve had all the other kinds of tea many times, but somehow failed to try white tea until now.

A big reason for this is that I have researched green tea a bunch and have tried it many times. How this relates to white tea is that I know green and white teas are made very similar to each other and I really don’t like the taste of green tea. It’s a little to vegetative for my liking.

I must admit though that I was pleasantly surprised when I tried white tea and found that it wasn’t as grass like as I thought it would be. In fact it was sort of sweet and smooth. This just goes to prove that even a veteran of tea can still discover new things. Either that or my taste buds are finally changing to accommodate the intricacies of fine teas.

White tea is not very easy to find in tea shops, and if you do find it there aren’t many flavors to choose from. I’ve also noticed how much more expensive white tea is. It really shouldn’t be because the demand for it isn’t that great but overall it still is pretty cheap.

Well I hope you learned something.

posted by Michael at 12:48 AM