A Nice Cuppa

So there I was, happily navigating the world of tea when, out of the blue, I had the rug pulled out from under me.

???So have you tried white tea???? an acquaintance asked me one day.

???White tea?! What???s white tea???? says I.

???You???ve never heard of white tea?!???

???Um ??? no,??? I respond rather weakly.

???Well! It???s a type of tea that???s high in antioxidants and really good for you, even more so than green tea!???

Argh!

As much as I love tea and my newly discovered love for tea, I often feel like I???m waging an uphill battle. There are so many teas out there that sometimes it feels like I???ll never get around to learning about all of them, or having the opportunity to try them.

Wanting to learn more about this mysterious white tea, I decided to head over to my local health food store which happens to carry a very large selection of fine tea. Sure enough, right there beside all the other teas that I???d painstakingly become familiar with was the aforementioned white tea.

I chose a box of white tea by one of my favorite local tea producers, Celebration Herbals, based in Ontario. Looking at the box I immediately noticed the words ???Premium Quality White Tea from China.???

The ingredients list stated that the tea was 100 percent Organic Chinese White Tea from the Camellia sinensis plant. I know that the Camelia sinensis plant is the plant from which other teas are harvested, such as green and black tea, but that still didn???t explain what white tea was.

I continued reading the box and came across the following point, ???White tea is distinguished from other teas by the place it comes from and the way it is processed. This tea comes from the Fujian province of China. ??? White teas are not oxidized at all, but are simply left to dry naturally then roasted to seal in all the flavors.???

While that explanation helped, I still needed some more information. Some researching on the Internet yielded two excellent resources about tea in general, and anything you???d want to know about tea. The first is The Tea Association of the United States, Inc. This is an association that you can actually join, however, if you don???t wish to join, there???s an incredible amount of useful information including a fact sheet on yearly tea consumption available to general readers. (Did you know that in 2005 Americans consumed more than 50 billions servings of tea?!)

The web site www.whitetea.cc also has several interesting and informative articles about white tea and its benefits, the most significant of which are the high levels of antioxidants in white tea. Check out the site for more information.

The final part of my initiation to white tea was, of course, the taste test. I happily purchased the box of Celebration Herbals White Tea and brought it home to brew myself a cup. The box has a section on it called ???Tasting Notes??? which indicated that white tea is refreshing and low in caffeine with a mild flavor. I brewed a cup by bringing fresh water to a rolling boil (as the package recommended) and steeping the tea for no more than a minute and a half.

I was pleasantly surprised by my first taste of white tea. It was indeed mild, but it also had a very subtle leafy flavor. It was the first of many cups of white tea to come!