Another White 2 Tea 2016 Sample – one I’ve heard great things about from other reviewers online. This tea is really quite good. For me, a session of Teadontlie goes through a few different stages. I tried it both in a porcelain gaiwan and in a Jianshui clay teapot. The tea went through the same general phases brewed either way, with some slight differences.
The first part of the session (~3 or 4 steeps) are soft and pretty sweet, with the tea just starting to ramp up. I detect notes of straw with slight citric notes at times and an unidentifiable fruity flavor. A sweet aftertaste fills my mouth after the sip, and the body is slightly viscous.
The second phase is where I slammed into a wall of astringency. This lasts for another 4 or so steeps, building to a crescendo and then dropping back out of the flavor profile. The tea tastes grassy and a bit floral with some building creaminess to me in this part – there is also some amount of a sour-ish fruity flavor still remaining as well. While they were quite astringent, these steeps weren’t really mouth-drying and weren’t entirely unpleasant. Interestingly, I found the astringency to be muted by my clay teapot.
The final phase, and when this tea was at its best, were steeps 8-13 or 14 or whenever I stopped steeping it. The tea started to get nicely fruity and creamy thick. I would call the fruitiness pineapple. It later faded into more of a coconut flavor – so it’s a tropical tea! I guess. Sometimes I also tasted that sweet finish as floral rather than coconut, so it could have just been my imagination making the association with pineapples. When I brewed this tea with my clay pot, the higher fruity flavors were a little blunted, so the pineapple was more solidly floral. I started to feel a little bit buzzy from the qi near the end of the session. Near the end of the session, all the flavors started to fade along with the creamy body, though the sweetness tasted almost caramel-y at the end!
On white2tea’s site, 2dog notes that this tea has a heavy astringency which will fade with age. If that holds true, this could be a really special tea in a few years (or however long it takes for that astringency to die down some). It was interesting to try this with both a gaiwan and a clay pot. A good tea, but will be better once the astringency’s a bit tempered. I may pick up a cake of it at some point because I kind of want to see what it will be like in a few years.
Flavors: Astringent, Coconut, Creamy, Floral, Pineapple, Straw, Sweet
