White tea turning into green tea in storage?!

White tea ages, very well I might add. But it usually turns to a sweet honey flavor, it sounds like a bit of moisture got to your tea an it oxidized slighty.

At least thats my guess…

Not sure how the tea would be moistened in an airtight Ziploc bag in low humidity. If anything, the buds seem drier and harder.

I have some aged Bai Mu Dan and Shou Mei cakes, so I recognize the look and taste of that kind of white tea transformation. But this silver needle is very different.

Oxidation can still occur even though it’s in an airtight Ziploc bag, just at a slower rate.

Maybe it’s just my impression but ziplock bags seem to allow for a lot more air contact than one might expect. There are surely different thicknesses of those, which would relate. I don’t intentionally age white teas all that much but have left versions around for some time, over a year, and none ever went towards being grassy, they just darkened, and picked up a mild earthiness. It does seem odd that it would seem like a green tea.

Wow, that’s very interesting, you could have created a new type of tea here!

I do agree with Ken and John though, I have a feeling some moisture must have got into the bag at some point, maybe bacteria or mould spores altered the flavour even, almost like with pu-ers, and then the tea dried. When wet leaves dry, they may become stiffer than before e.g. due to the spores/ mineral precipitates from the water, making the leaf denser.

Or maybe it’s that the more volatile compounds that originally gave the leaf a sweet flavour have evaporated, so now all you can taste is the astringency / grassiness/ vegetal notes from the catechins left behind?

As you know, you don’t get gree tea from just leaving tea to dry, the leaves need to go through a very complex series of steps, including baking at a high temperature to get a green tea, so it can’t have actually turned into a ‘green’ tea.

Very interetsing though, thank you for sharing!

Yulia X

It seems like common knowledge, although to some extent the details wouldn’t be, but green tea is made essentially just by stopping oxidation by heating the leaves. Enzymes in the leaves help cause oxidation, a reaction based on oxygen influencing existing compounds, but nothing quite as simple as lighting a fire or a newspaper turning yellow. All this didn’t seem so relevant since the question was how the character of a different tea type could become more like a green tea type, which isn’t so easy to get a handle on, it couldn’t relate to “undoing” oxidation. All the same I’ll mention a good reference on what oxidation is, a World of Tea article that keeps it simple and clear (sort of; this is just a part of it):

https://www.worldoftea.org/tea-leaves-oxidation/

Much of the oxidation process revolves around polyphenols and the enzymes polyphenol oxidase and peroxidase. When the cells inside tea leaves are damaged and the components inside are exposed to oxygen and mix, specifically when polyphenols in the cell’s vacuoles and the peroxidase in the cell’s peroxisomes mix with polyphenol oxidase in the cell’s cytoplasm1 a chemical reaction begins. This reaction converts the polyphenols known as catechins into flavanoids called theaflavins and thearubigins (which are also polyphenols). Theaflavins provide tea with its briskness and bright taste as well as its yellow color, and thearubigins provide tea with depth, body and its reddish color.

Another kind of new tea? Will it bad, there are pictures for reference ?

I must have missed the original post. White tea, by definition is unprocessed or lightly processed (sun drying for example) tea.

On the other hand, green teas are processed by either steaming or pan frying etc.

So white tea will never be green tea, or vice versa.

White tea that sits will oxidise over time. The final result being closer to black tea.

Some high quality white teas are purposely aged for this reason.