Bai Mu Dan aka ‘White Peony’

White tea is a specialty of Fujian, China; although teas like Bai Mu Dan are made all over the world. The processing of a white tea is relatively straightforward and its cost is based on the time farmers spent picking the buds/leaf, the terroir of the tea plantation and subsequent quality of the tea bushes, and finally by things like historical fame. In the case of ‘Mu Dan’ tea (which is a picking criteria) historical fame and quality of the overall area are the major factors which contribute to cost.

Looking at the over all quality of white tea, sub-classes are arranged by the type of leaf material picked from the bush. Silver Needle (Yin Zhen), White Peony (Mu Dan), Gong Mei, and Shou Mei. There are some producers that don’t pick a silver needle and instead focus on just making a high end Mu Dan, this producer does a little of both. This tea consists of the silver needle and the first leaf. Slightly lower quality mu dan teas will also include the 2nd leaf. In the quality spectrum Mu Dan tea is the ‘2nd level’ of white tea classification and generally costs much less than silver needles. Silver Needles aka Yin Zhen is the highest classification of quality and consists of only unopened buds of the tea leaf, I sell a silver needle tea too but a lot of white tea drinkers prefer a Mu Dan tea to a silver needle tea due to the increase of flavor that the slightly more mature leaf gives to the final product compared to just being the buds.

A great Mu Dan is picked with the silver needle and first leaf. The vast majority of this Mu Dan is just that — but as you can see in the picture above the pickers are not infallible!

This particular Mu Dan tea comes from a mountain called Jiufeng which is about 30 minutes West of Fuding city and is created with the tea cultivar called “Fuding Da Bai” — “Big White” in English.

With a good white tea, you really get to experience the natural flavor of the tea bush without adulteration but they’re not all created equal. Although the processing of white tea is simple, it’s due to that simplicity that within the few steps from start to finish there’s a lot of variation. The process basically involves picking the buds and first leaf together, withering them to a low moisture content (10~15%), and finally drying them over a low heat. As the leaf withers, cellulose barriers within it break down and chemicals within the bud which previously had no way to contact each other start to mingle and create new aromatic compounds and flavors. For the farmer, knowing how far to take this process before drying i out is critical to the potential of the teas fragrance.

Drying the leaf afterwards is just as important because now the farmer has to bring the moisture down to <6% using charcoal heat without allowing smoke or buildup of excess heat to damage what they’ve created in the withering process.

Speaking to caffeine and health benefits, well — there’s a lot of both. It’s about as ‘raw’ as you’re going to get tea, nothing has been ‘hurt’ by high temperatures, and the first picking of the year is full of the stored energy the bush kept to live through winter. The enzymes which would change the ‘white’ leaf to ‘black’ are still active but require humidity to continue to transform, which the dried tea no longer has. If the tea is stored in a humid area it will ‘age’ as Pu’Erh tea and wine does, over decades developing a special level of richness. Caffeine is particularly high in the young parts of the tea bush — and this teas material is the absolute youngest. If you want to get ‘tea drunk’ white tea in general is very good for that.

As a final note: I am also selling 2 other white teas this year. A silver needle from the same farm and another Mu Dan from Yunnan province (opposite side of China). The major differences between the 2 Mu Dans would be the age of the bushes, ecology, and cultivar. The Yunnan tea is the type of tea bush native to the heartland of tea (Camellia Sinensis var. Assamica) while this one is Camellia Sinensis var. Sinensis. Yunnan’s environment assures a long life to tea bushes if left undisturbed by humans; the teas that grow in mono-culture tea plantations are very ‘artificial’ by comparison. Both are great teas, very different. The Yunnan tea has more of a fruitiness to it, easily comparable to a young sheng pu’erh.