Silver Buds Yabao

Thank you so much Jason for sending me a sample of this special tea!

Finally, my spirit was calm enough to drink this tea and appreciate it fully. The time had to be right. So much chaos lately, with little rest.

I didn’t want to rush a rare tea that I couldn’t gather up for myself again. This Yabao is gone. No longer available. ( Psych Joke is on me! I thought this tea was gone,but it’s NOT! So I’m dancing in place (tap, tap, tap! Love happy endings!)

The dry leaves looked like large daggers of wheat and when wet turned bright green, cream and toast.
Smelling like newly sheared grass on a warm Spring evening. Sweet floating scent carried easily on the wind.
The liquor through these 15 second steepings in my Gaiwan, were very clear. Pristine.

1. My first taste was a gentle mist of honeydew melon, light and airy. The juice sparkled then thickened at the very back of the throat. This startled me. How could this be a Pu’er? My mind was stunned not knowing how to process what I was tasting.

2. This cup became a vision of pine trees around a pool of water with light reflecting off the surface. Glistening, sugary bursts heady and intoxicating. Looking down from a point above the pines, gliding on silk…the taste so smooth, fluid and lasting.

3. I didn’t want to admit to it. No! But, I did smell snickerdoodle in the leaves. Ah, yes. Spice and rock sugar, sweet and juicy with some of the pine trees hiding in the background like a trip to a fabled Fairytale House filled with much craved treats.
The best was indeed yet to come.

4. There was an odd smell in the leaves that made me crazy! I wanted to know what it was?! I loved the smell!
This steeping took me on a journey back to the Sierra foothill town of Paradise. One way I heated my home was by woodstove. Being a woman alone with 5 teenaged girls (only 1 was mine…the rest were “throw away kids” that nobody wanted) we had to cut wood and stoke the stove to keep warm in Winter. I remembered the smell of cutting down trees…the smell of the center of the wood and fresh sap. Even though we used cedar and oak, Christmas meant Pine tree cutting.
This Silver Bud Yabao on infusion #4 was smelling like fresh cut pine wood, and sweet like rock sugar, juicy and silky at the finish.

Magnificient! Stunning!

Thank you Jason!

First off THANK YOU Bonnie for the opportunity to taste this tea

Dry smell: The dry smell is a lot different than I expected. It has a very sour, green vegetal smell that reminds me of grass and dandelions in the summer. It has a wet tree bark smell, a slight hint of a green apple. I was expecting a much darker smell so I’m not quite sure what to expect from this tea.

Wet smell: The wet smell is delicious in a really strange way. It is very dark and I can smell the dark aroma of forest. It still has a sour aroma but became a lot deeper and richer than when it was dry.

Taste: This is a strange tea, unlike anything I’ve ever tasted before. It has a really light flavor that I can’t place. It’s a smooth, creamy flavor of spices. I think the strangest part of this tea is that when I start to swallow, there is an extremely sweet flavor on the roof of my mouth. It is like sugar is melting right on top of my throat. It’s a strange flavor.

This is an interesting tea, I’m not sure if I like it or not. I was a good experience anyways

I have been playing around with this tea to figure out the best way to steep it. Definitely more leaves and more time if you want a richer cup.
I iced some buds a few days ago and have been french pressing them in the fridge. Once there is about 1/3 of the liquid left, I refill it with boiling water and put it back in the fridge. This gave me a really refreshing delightful brew with sweet pine dew notes and marshmallows with sweet cookies. Perhaps sugar cookies? The taste is very smooth and thick.. it’s quite thick tasting actually. This is really surprising due to the extremely pale liquor. The sweetness is amazing also. The first steeps, it was definitely more sugary sweet, now it’s nectar sweet.. pine nectar. mmmMmm
Who knew these little buds would taste so good? And be so cost-effective. I’ve done 4 really long icing steeps for one set of leaves and I’m onto number five now. I have a feeling I will get many more too. So happy I have these lovely buds for summer time!

Edit: Honestly, I keep drinking this iced, and as it warms up, the sweetness increases. It’s at the point now that my mouth is coated in sweetness, like a simple (but extremely complex tasting) sugar syrup. Each sip stokes the sugary fire. So much goodness.

Edit #2: Here’s the thing. Still making iced tea from the same buds (this is about the 6th or 7th looooong large steep!!) and I still get flavour from them! I had to give you all an update of this as I just got the most delightful sweet rock sugar taste in the middle of my tongue and it made me giddy! ohhhh I love tea. :D

Eight Treasures Yabao is probably my favorite Verdant blend so when Terri HarpLady sent me some of the yabao, I was excited, why did it take me this long to get to it? Ha.

Immediately after being hit with water, these buds smell like hay, almost exactly like a white tea, and sweet marshmallows, with just a little mint. I did two rinses and I’m steeping for five seconds.

First steep: still got that mintiness and a bit of other spice, but with sweetness. It also tastes a bit like a hint of sparkling water was added to the cup.

I ended up steeping this about 6 times before I got bored with it, I still have it in the infuser so I may save it for tomorrow. It continues to be sweet and sort of marshmallowy, with a hint of pine.

Thank you to Bonnie for this sample. You are most excellent, m’dear.

It looks like bits off an ear of wheat. Well weird, so naturally I wanted to taste it, but I have held off until I was in a fit state to do so properly. So, I have set up my books and laptop in the kitchen next to the kettle and am getting on with some work while taking time out to enjoy this tea. I should probably focus solely on the tea until my eyeballs are swimming but that is not practical, alas. Enough of my wittering on. What’s it like?

The aroma of the wet leaf reminds me of pine resin and freshly baked oat biscuit (that’s cookie to some of you!) with cinnamon. Behind that is a hint of spring, apple blossom and fresh rain. Yikes, look at me going over the top with the descriptions! The liquor is practically clear too. And the taste? There’s that pine again, something peppery at the back of my tongue, a hint of apple and a lingering sparkly, peppery aftertaste. It reminds me of champagne in tea form. This is feelgood tea. I love it and it is going on the shopping list.

Um, I think I may have stepped into “too weird for me” territory with this one.

The smell is… really weird. Kind of familiar, but not from any teas I’ve been drinking. I think it’s a plant smell, though. Not sure it’s a smell I want in my mouth, but my level of caring is definitely low enough right now that I’ll do it.

Sooooo here goes…

Ok, it’s sweet. And the sweetness cuts some of the “weird”, but it’s still there. It almost like… a green branch taste?? Actually, I wonder if what it’s reminding me of is apple tree cuttings. My mom would prune the apple trees in our yard in the spring, and when the cuttings were still supple (and we were young), my sister and I would sometimes take them and strip off the bark to reach green fibrous tissue underneath. Beneath that was the wood, which we’d then use as, say, walking sticks for our Barbies (which often went camping in the garden). My plant brain isn’t working tonight; I should know what those two parts are, oh well. So yeah, the green fibrous stuff would get under our fingernails, and I probably chewed on the branch to get it off sometimes. I think that’s the flavour I’m tasting. Makes a bit of sense, really, given that these are buds.

Gotta say though, even knowing that, this tea is still weird. It’s not bad, but… I don’t think it’s one for me. I will say that it’s grown on me through drinking this cup, and I’ll probably go for another couple infusions, but still, it’s weird :P (Side note: I can taste the “tea” flavour lightly at the end of the sip, which is nice, but not enough for me.)

ETA: Yeah, it’s two days later and wanted to clear out my infuser so I could drink some green teas, but couldn’t bear to throw these once-used buds out… so gave it another shot.

Second infusion (boiling/4min): The buds seem to have lost some of their “weird” smell and smell much sweeter, with a background of “tea”. Yep, I’m very descriptive tonight. The steeped tea smells more like a sweet white tea now, which is much more appealing. The taste is definitely similar to the previous, but with the aforementioned switch from predominantly weird to predominantly sweet and white-tea-like. I think I’ve finally figured out part of what I’m tasting though – this tea is peppery. Like steeped black pepper, but only a touch, which comes with a light zing. I actually like this particular infusion. I wonder if perhaps I should have just rinsed the leaves a bit longer in the beginning. I really need to look up proper rinsing technique. I also almost want to say that I’m almost tasting juniper. Both the pepperiness and juniper would have been present in that first infusion, just unidentified. Based on this infusion alone, I’m bumping the rating; perhaps this is not my cup of tea, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.

Third infusion (boiling/4min):
After this infusion was finished, I smelled the wet buds and got that intense “weird” aroma again, and was quite worried that this cup would be back to a flavour I don’t like. Luckily, not true. It’s very much like a lighter version of infusion 2. Pleasant lingering white tea aftertaste, delicious sweetness. I should have also mentioned that there’s no hint whatsoever of astringency or bitterness.

So, it looks like perhaps I just need to begin with a longer first rinse for this tea, or maybe steep it for a couple minutes and discard that infusion, to let the strange flavours weaken a bit. This ended up being quite an interesting experience, as it turned out! Glad I only bought the budset sampler though :)

ETA again: Another quick note – the sweetness in this tea lingers like that from fennel/anise/licorice. I seem to dislike that, so I suppose that’s another unappealing factor for me.

Sorry to be absent for a while on Steepster. We have been busy putting the finishing touches on our new website. With that done, I hope to contribute more to the conversations here, and answer whatever questions I am able to.

I thought that with the season, yabao would be a good tea to meditate on. Here in Minnesota, all the trees are just bursting with little “yabao” buds. They are those hard buds ready to unfold into a clump of leaves. I can only imagine the little buds in Yunnan right now and the Xingchen workshop busy picking.

I stumbled upon Yabao as a complete accident. I drank tea with the same vendor every day for a month or so, and each day they would pull out something new and crazy to challenge me, asking me questions about what I tasted. Finally, they ran out of new things to show me, until he remembered yabao.

The vendor looked sort of shifty-eyed around him before pulling a pressed brick of the buds out from under his desk. He wouldn’t say a word about it before I tried it. When I was at a loss for words, tasting something I had never before experienced, a look of triumph appeared on his face. “I bet you have never had THIS one before, huh?”

He was right! I didn’t even know what those strange little buds could be. He explained that they are picked in late winter and that only a few of them can be taken from each tree so as not to stunt the tree’s growth. I unfolded a bud for me and showed how many layers they have. We counted over a dozen.

I resolved to get some of this tea. I went back every day asking him about the yabao, but he didn’t want to part with any. He only had nine bricks. Finally, right before I left, he gave me one of his bricks. Last time I was in China, he was pleased to hear that I was going to brew it at my wedding for the guests.

The woman in Kunming who represents Xingchen workshop was so surprised when I walked into her shop and immediately identified a bag of yabao. She practically jumped out of her seat. “Don’t you want jasmine or something? How do you know about yabao?” I explained to her trying it before, and she invited me to sit for the full afternoon drinking some pretty crazy teas.

I was able to get back in touch with her workshop when I started Verdant Tea. In fact, yabao was one of the teas I was most excited to share when I was just getting started. It is a subtle experience to be sure, but one whose depth is rewarding under the right circumstances. I enjoy yabao the most in the evenings when it is dark and quiet, as it reminds me of mulling spice, of cedar wood chests, and the like. It is fun to see others discovering yabao as well. Happy tasting!

The buds smell like brown sugar. Soooo good. They still smell like tea, just with a great earthy sweet spiciness permeating them.
I went with western style brewing – I rinsed them, then steeped for 4 minutes. The liquour is such a delicate light color.
The liquour smells a little woodsy. Like taking a tree, deep red with rain and drizzling honey over it and brown sugar and then sticking it over a fire, letting the sugar crystals pop and spark into a molasses syrup imbued with the scent of the wood.
I’m honestly not sure if I like the flavor. It is a strange mixture of sweet and woodsy. It certainly isn’t bad and it is fascinating but it’s not necessarily a flavor profile I’m feeling.
It does have a really nice aftertaste of nectar or sugar.
I think I prefer brewing Verdant teas gongfu style. Today I just seem to lack the mental energy.

So this was the tea I wanted to try the most. Mainly because I still have some of the Sun-Dried Winter Yabao still left. I wanted to put them side by side and to taste them both. Yabao is a tea that I have been trying to find out more about. I have been to the Verdant website and read everything, but there is really nothing else that I can find on the internet about the tea. Different types? Health benefits?

I put the Winter in my gaiwan and the Silver in a tasting cup. Let it begin…

The dry leaf:
Winter- cedar with some spice
Silver Buds- sweet mustard

Wet leaf:
Winter- cedar
Silver buds-floral sweetness, marshmallow,baked peach.

Color:
Winter-dark yellow
Silver buds-Clear

1st steep:5mins, 2nd steep:10min, 3rd steep:20mins

Winter: woody and light, became sweet through the steeps.
Silver buds: marshmallow sweetness, became more floral after each steep.

I like them both, but the Silver Buds was the one that I would give to someone that is not a tea drinker and I wanted to show them something new and complex. I loved it! I ordered 2oz of the silver buds and Im glad that I did.

To bad I can’t add a picture of my tasting…:)

Thanks to Bonnie for this very generous sample and many others I have yet to try

I was suprised when I tasted this Pu-erh! It tasted more like a white tea! When brewed the water (I was going to brew this “gaiwan style” but when I measured 6 grams on my scale it looked like a LOT of tea..but for western style it only needed 1.5 teaspoons..why is that? how come so much for a small 4oz gaiwan??) is almost clear and it takes awhile for the buds to “open up” a little bit. This tea had a very strange camphor/piney note which I can’t accurately describe, it wasn’t unpleasant..just different for my tastes. It had a very sweet, sugary aftertaste and the piney/earthy note lasted until the 5th infusion. This is my second verdant tea and I have to say that they have an extremely high quality of product!! I will definitely be purchasing from them again !!

This is fantastic (so glad I have two samples). This is like Bai Mu Dan and Shou Mei on crack. It’s Soooo sweet and a bit more herbaceous. Wet leaves smell like rosemary and artichoke and I taste candied rosemary and some melon in this third steep. Husband said it tasted like bath water or brewed rocks (okay so he may be onto something with the mineral note) and he does not taste the sweetness. How?! I’m getting a divorce.

First steep was for 15 secs but when I saw all the recommendations for longer steeps I set the timer for two minutes, however a smelled it at 1 mins declared it too good not to drink and set the tea maker on my mug. So glad I did! Third steep is just under two minutes. Would like to try it with tea in the cup and cold brewed in the future. I also would like to acquire more of this and age it. And I want a husband who has taste buds that work. Edit: sister stopped by and shared two steeps with me. She said it’s yummy. Also researching theanine and I do believe I am tea drunk. I <3 my yabao

Verdant Tea rocks my socks, not only for their amazing teas, but also for their out of this world customer service. I feel like David Duckler is a personal friend of mine, and that’s an awesome feeling to get from a company.

Like my wife said, we both got six months subscriptions to Verdant Tea’s tea-of-the-month service for each other, and David has wonderfully agreed to combine them so we get ten months of glorious tea. I see this being a subscription we definitely keep up with, we’re already so impressed!

Included in the package were two straight teas and an herbal to mix with the other two, a very detailed and incredibly interesting letter explaining a bit about the tea and helpful hints on how to combine them, and tasting notecards for each tea. Just lovely.

We tried this tea on its own last night and it is delicious. Spicy with a touch of sweetness, I was sad when I found my cup empty. I look forward to resteeping this over and over and being continually surprised by the full flavor coming from a tea that gives such a clear liquid.

I was nervous to try this one after reading the description. Floral aroma, woodsy. That’s exactly what it is, but it is soooo good! It smells piney and tastes a little piney. Happy this was part of the tea of the month, especially since it’s sold out now!

Well, it’s about time I try this tea! I’ve been nervous and excited for it, especially after reading all the reviews. I love the look of this tea, little buds, they look so fresh and spring like to me! I feel like I am taking an adventuresome, yet calming walk in the forest with this tea!

The dry smell is definitely a faint cedar, with some spice. The wet leaves, from what I can decipher, are some kind of grassy scent, but with a forest in there as well, and I also detect something spicy again and something..hmm…a sweet fruit? Almost like a nectarine to me, I could be way off though! It’s a very interesting smell to say the least, I like it so far. I steeped for 4 mins in boiling water, after a rinse, as recommended by David on Verdant’s site.

Now for taste! Wowzers, this tea is really unique! It’s really quite light, but there’s a definite cedar, woodsy note, and I get some sugar sweetness at the end. It’s so strange that it tastes this way, so foresty, given that the tea itself is nearly clear! However, it does remind me of white tea, so the light color isn’t entirely off. It has a fresh taste, and a warming note to it as well. It’s times like this that I do wish I had a gaiwan though, to try lovely teas like this, I think even more flavors would become pronounced! I’m picturing myself walking through a serene forest, with spring buds poking out in the spring, brown leaves on the ground, and a nice little waterfall into a stream. Haha, I love how poetic tea makes me feel sometimes :)

Overall, I like this. I’m anxious to try steeping it a few times to see how the flavors change. Once again, a hit from Verdant!

Fascinating tea. Again Verdant continues to amaze me with their complex and different teas. Upon opening the bag I didn’t really smell anything at all, I smelled a little bit of cardboard but I was trying so hard to smell something that I could have been smelling the cardboard for recycling behind me. The buds are fat and short and fuzzy, they kind of remind me of a Beech trees buds in the way the scales overlap but shorter.

The wet leaves smell was like walking through a wet mixed forest in fall after the leaves have fallen. It was a very wet woody scent. The infusion was more or less clear and had that same woodsy scent with stronger pine notes and a slight floral note.

Taste was clear and bright at first sip followed by pine and cedar notes with the wet woods. There was a spiciness I picked up, like black pepper and a sweet minty like aftertaste. In later steepings the pine/cedar notes take dominance with some sweetness, the floral notes fade, the minty aftertaste kind of hangs around but you have to look for it and the black pepper note disappeared around the third steeping. I’m interested in seeing how this ages.

I steeped this so far about 5-6 times and am about to make another cup. Steeping method is a 5 oz cup with an infuser basket with short steep times with 205F water. The first infusion was about 10 seconds and now I’m steeping about 20 seconds for the 6 or 7 steep.

All my teas arrived today, and I decided to start with the one I have no prior experience to benchmark. There is simply nothing like a yabao other than yabao. I tried to order the late winter variant, but they must be out because the site kept redirecting me to these and these are what I got.

To say this is going to be an exercise in subtly would be a vast understatement.

The buds are quite fat, and the color of lawn thatch when dry. They have almost no aroma that I can detect.

I did a quick rinse to remove dust and to heat all my vessels, I’m using my new double gaiwan technique to do steepings. Watching the buds pop open is a bit creepy and the whole affair reminds me a bit of eating crickets.

The wet buds smell exactly like bai mu dan, which makes perfect sense. They’re both white buds.

1st ~ As long as it took to pour the water in, cover, and pour the water out. The result is almost perfectly clear. But there is flavor, here. I’ll be darned if the toasted marshmallow comment in the write-up isn’t true. There’s also a non-green vegetable here. Maybe a root or tuber. Like ginger but not quite that sharp.

2nd ~ Again, just a few seconds. Still no color. Again, something sweet and biting, like ginger candy, but very soft. Maybe it isn’t a vegetable, maybe it is Autumnal leaf piles. Maybe it is old, wet ones moldering a bit.

This is not a tea for accompanying anything. It requires total concentration to taste anything at all.

3rd ~ A three count between pouring and pouring. Just a bit of a hint of yellow color. Flavor a bit more present, but still very gentle.

The write-up claims you can get 18 infusions, but I don’t know if I can focus that long.

I used 1tsp in a gaiwan which is what the instructions recommend, but I think next time I’ll try more and see if I can’t get things a bit more concentrated.

This is very interesting, but I’m hard-pressed to see it becoming a staple on my shelf.

Loose
Appearance: large buds, reminiscent of the tops of wheat, mostly pale blond, with hints of sandy coloration
Aroma when Dry: sticky spiced vanilla
After water is first poured: pine, citrus, melon and sweet cream
At end of first steep: same
Tea liquor:
At end of first steep: clear
Staple? No.
Preferred time of day: unsure, first tasting
Taste:
At first: bright, melon tangy,
As it cools ? Notes open, tea gets velvety, fuzzy, then fluffy and brothy
Additives used (milk, honey, sugar etc)? No

Lingers? Yes, with a fuzzy, creamy texture melon and honey notes

Second steep: (1 min)
Aroma: bitter melon
Taste:
At first: bitter, sour, layered, fuzzy, then pine notes
As it cools: salty notes surface, tea gets increasingly sour notes that linger, then tea sweetens again, into salty brothyness, starts to close on lemony note

Third Steep (2 min)
Aroma: bitter melon, lighter notes, cucumber minty
Taste:
At first: bitter, and then cloying sweet cocoa nutty cookie, closing on spiced vanilla notes
As it cools: cucumber melon cookie dough? notes

Fourth Steep (2 min)
Aroma: melon, lemon
Taste:
At first: silky melon floral, with lemon
As it cools: same notes, adding salty brothy notes

I still think this tastes like cream of wheat with a little milk & vanilla added, maybe a tiny sprinkle of cinnamon. Ari agreed.

For the fact that this smells like trees, I’m immediately drawn to it. I am not disappointed with how it tastes, either. It looks like it will be a delicate tea, as it is pale when brewed, but the taste is complex and robust. Not robust like black tea; robust in its own way. I feel I need to be listening to serene and deeply troubled classical music (Moonlight Sonata) and watching snowflakes fall while drinking this tea. It’s different and flavorful, and I like it.
I used 1.5 Tablespoons for 8 oz of water, with a quick rinse.
Anyone know the relative amount of caffeine in this tea?

You know what’s absolutely amazing with this tea?

Monkey bread. Seriously. I know that’s probably tea-blasphemy or something but it seriously works together in an I NEVER WANT THIS TO END sort of way.