I’m currently typing this on my very cranky laptop that’s torturing me by suddenly hanging up (current forced restart count: 4). I don’t think I’ve hit save so often since school days! Luckily, I’ve been trying tea, which always puts me in a good mood.

Today’s tea is a very special type of white tea from Parchmen & Co. Most of the time, the white teas I see are either the traditional white teas made from buds or very simply processed tea leaves (personally, I prefer the traditional tea bud type of tea). This tea, however, is made from the flower buds of the camellia sinensis plant. The tea plant is normally not allowed to flower as the buds are picked to make tea, but in this case, the buds were allowed to develop a little further before they picked and processed.

The Tea: First Look

The tea is literally all flower buds with a faint floral scent. According to the packet, this should be brewed using 90 degree water and a ration of 3g of tea to 150ml of water.

Interestingly enough, I tried googling for more information on this tea, but searchers for “tea flower” just brought up results for blooming tea. I had to switch to “camellia sinensis flower bud” before I found relevant results, and even then, most of the results were for the plant. At any rate, I’d assume that this tea contains a fair amount of caffeine since caffeine is nature’s insecticide and I’d imagine that the buds are the part of the plant that need the most protection. As to the other constituents in the bud, I’ve tried looking on google scholar but didn’t see anything about it – I’m guessing it’s got the health benefits of most teas, but in what amounts, I have no idea.

Taste Test

The packet only had instructions on the preferred temperature and amount of water for brewing, but nothing on how long to steep it. Based on my experience in their Theanine! Tea Pairing with Chocolate and Cheese workshop, the steeping time wasn’t too long. So I steeped it for about 1 minute using 90 degree water and got this light yellow tea liquor:

The taste of tea was sweet and floral with slight peppery notes. The pepper notes grew stronger as the tea cooled down, while the floral notes became slightly less prominent. It was definitely a pleasant and refreshing tea – I’m not a fan of overly floral teas but this hit the spot.

The second brewing onwards is where it got interesting. The tea steeped extremely quickly and I only needed approximately 30 seconds to get a dark yellow tea liquor. The tea liquor from the second brewing had pretty pronounced bitter notes and increased astringency. The level of astringency was something I enjoyed, but not the bitter notes. I tried to shorten the time even more for the third steep to about 10 seconds but the bitter notes were still there.

Finally, I decided to try increasing the amount of water. I think I used about double of what I used for the first brew, increasing the brewing time to about 1 minute, and that did the trick. The bitter notes were mostly gone, although there was a faint bitter note in the aftertaste. The sweet and floral notes were still noticeable, although they weren’t as strong as during the first brew.

Overall, this was a very interesting tea. Apart from the fact that it’s made from the buds of the tea plant, which was something I haven’t really come across, the tea making experience was pretty unique too. Normally, the only variable I change between steeps would be the timing and that normally does the trick (as it did with the Hida black tea). I don’t normally have to experiment with water volume and as far as I remember, when this tea was served at the workshop, it was in the same teapot.

The only difference I can think of is that the workshop used a normal teapot while I used the T2 teamaker – perhaps that does affect taste? Or perhaps it took some time for the tea to “wake up” so the amount of water that worked for the first steep became too little for subsequent steeps. I thought I measured the tea correctly but it’s possible that I made a mistake. For now, I’m marking this as a mysteary, and will be using the rest of the packet to experiment with brewing styles.