The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea - Michael Harney [9]
BAI MU DAN White Peony
Among the most popular and easy to find of the white teas, Bai Mu Dan also bridges the gap between white teas and green with its mixture of tips and whole tea leaves and resulting mild vegetal flavors. A relative of Yin Zhen (page 21), Bai Mu Dan comes from the same cultivar. Unlike any other white tea in this chapter, Bai Mu Dan also includes some mature tea leaves. The finest have the highest ratio of buds to leaves. Lower-grade Bai Mu Dan is easy to spot with its large, green-brown leaves, dark and gangly from growing too long on the plant. The best Bai Mu Dan is harvested in late April and the first half of May. Bai Mu Dan is air-dried, making its vegetal flavors milder than green teas’, veering to yellow squash rather than the more robust flavors of artichokes or spinach. Sometimes the tea is finished over a coal fire or in an oven, which gives the tea a faint roasted flavor.
Bai Mu Dan was developed in the early twentieth century in northern Fujian province. Over the ensuing decades, the production area migrated to the coastal region around the big Fujian province port city of Fuding. Unlike the previous three teas, which are rarer, Bai Mu Dan is produced in quantities large enough to fill many shipping containers every spring. The tea’s international popularity is understandable. It bridges the best of two worlds, offering the savory, vegetal satisfaction of a green tea along with the sweetness and subtlety of a great white.
CHINESE GREEN TEAS
1. Pan Long Ying Hao
2. Jin Shan
3. Bi Lo Chun
4. Lung Ching
5. Huangshan Mao Feng
6. Taiping HouKui
7. Dragon Pearl Jasmine
8. Gunpowder
You’ve mastered the flavors of white teas made just with buds; now with Chinese green teas you get your first experience of mature tea leaves that have been not merely air-dried, but cooked to preserve their color and enhance their flavor. While milder than most black teas, green teas are considerably more assertive than whites, with a fuller, rounder body, a darker liquor, and delicious vegetal flavors.
Although green teas now grow all over the world, the finest come from China and Japan. I begin with China’s in small part because they have a much deeper history: China has been producing tea for at least the last five thousand years, while the Japanese have made tea in earnest for just the last five hundred. Far more significant for your palate, however, I start with Chinese greens because they are lighter and less intense. Sharing some of the sweetness of white teas, they make for a more natural choice to follow whites in our tasting progression. Compared with the darker, more mouth-filling Japanese green teas, Chinese greens have the gentler vegetal flavors of steamed leeks, green beans, or bok choy. And where Japanese greens have no sugariness, Chinese greens have charming sweet notes of cooked carrots, jasmine, and sometimes a subtle hint of honey.
Much of this sweetness begins in the fields, stemming from the same component in white tea: the bud. The best Chinese green teas are hand-harvested in the spring from “leafsets,” consisting of a bud and its two adjacent leaves. Plucked over a tiny window of just ten to fourteen days in late March or early April, these springtime leafsets hold more sugars and other flavor compounds than leaves at any other time of year. As the temperature rises and the plant emerges from winter dormancy, the roots send out stored glucose and other flavor compounds to the buds to restart growth. Spring teas may also have more antioxidants, as the plant sends out extra polyphenols to protect the leaves from bugs. In China, these springtime teas are sometimes called Qing Ming teas, since their harvest begins around the same time as China’s Qing Ming spring festival.
The light flavors of Chinese greens emerge only after the leaves have been plucked and then fixed. When tea makers “fix” green teas, they preserve the chlorophyll by quickly heating the leaves after harvest. The heat destroys