The second tea from my White Tea Gift Set, this is probably the most interesting in terms of flavor combination. When looking at flavored white tea, you typically will see it paired with more delicate and sweet fruits such as peach or blueberry but never with toffee.
Outsides: A bit of a different style of white tea (Pai Mu Tan) with blue cornflower (which is not listed in the ingredients) and little toffee squares. The tea smells fabulously nutty, a little like fresh-baked almond cookies, and I like the contrast of the blue cornflowers to the brownish-yellow of pretty much everything else. Again, I brewed about a teaspoon of this at 70 degrees Celsius but I prolonged the time to about 3 minutes (it didn’t taste nutty enough for me). The liquid is more golden than the Silver Needle and has a delicate sweet and nutty smell to it.
Insides: A lot of times when you get flavored tea, the flavor ends up tasting really fake and detracts from whatever qualities the base tea had. This is the opposite. The nutty flavor is very light and delicate while also tasting very real. There’s also a complexity to it, with the nutty flavor adding a nice musk and earthiness while the white tea adds a bit of a floral undertone and the little squares adding a subtle sweetness. One thing I advise which may seem like a total no-brainer to some people is to use filtered water. I sometimes don’t care about that and this tea really brings out the flavor of the impurities in our water. I also think that it tastes best on it’s own without sugar.
Overall: Very nice and something that I’m definitely ordering again from Zen Tea.
My Rating: Buy it!
Zen Tea is a relatively new online tea retailer that specializes in mid-to-high quality tea. Right now, they have a 50% off tea sale until Dec 24th if you enter the promo code Holidays and I have to say, it's pretty worth it.
