Bai Mu Tan White Tea
Bai Mu Tan (more often romanized Bai Mudan and known in English as White Peony) is a Chinese white tea made from the young shoots of the tea plant. Each shoot is typically one downy bud with its first two leaves. The leaves are withered and dried with minimal handling and are neither rolled nor deliberately oxidized. It sits between the all-bud Silver Needle and the leafier Gongmei and Shoumei in the traditional white tea grades. It brews into a pale golden infusion.
Documented in
- Bloom by SKBI Brewery
Bloom is made from a Chinese white tea, Bai Mu Tan (Fujian, China).
SKBI - Bloom
How bai mu tan white tea is prepared
Hot-brewed as a straight tea in a gaiwan, small teapot, or Western pot, using water below boiling. Also cold-brewed or iced. It serves as a base for flower- and fruit-scented blends, as a gentle substrate for kombucha and other fermented tea drinks, and as a delicate tea component in non-alcoholic mixed drinks and tea-based spritzes.
Extracting an ingredient into a liquid or fat. Temperature and duration depend on the documented application.
NINO uses Sencha, Gunpowder, Lemon Verbena, Pai Mu Tan and Elderflower Infusion in Lily: a tea and herb infusion of Sencha and Gunpowder green teas, lemon verbena, Pai Mu Tan white tea and elderflower.[7]
Service signal Works as a infusion component.
Pai Mu Tan white tea infusion, 61%.[8]
61% White Peony Superior, Fujian.[9]
Other preparations
The producer brews its teas with fermentation (producer claims d83dabc278d7, 425e745b47ce).[10]
PROXIES uses White Peony Tea in Blanc Slate: white peony (bai mu dan) white tea; how it is brewed is not specified.[11]
In depth
Fujian's tradition of sun-dried tea
Bai Mu Tan grew out of a long-standing Fujian preference for tea that is simply withered and dried rather than fired. Song dynasty tea writing already praised a rare, hard-to-make white tea from Fujian, prized for its tender buds and subtle taste. By the Ming period, writers on tea were ranking sun-dried leaf above leaf fixed over flame, because it tasted closer to nature and carried no smoky character. That aesthetic of a pure, lightly handled infusion is the background against which the later white tea grades, Bai Mu Tan among them, took shape as drinks.[1]
Birth of a bud-and-leaf white tea
White tea as it is defined in China today crystallized in northern Fujian from the late eighteenth century onward. Growers around Fuding and Zhenghe selected downy large-white tea bushes, the Fuding Da Bai and Zhenghe Da Bai cultivars, whose shoots wither into silvery leaf. The finest output was bud-only Silver Needle, which entered the export trade in the late nineteenth century. Plucking a bud together with its first leaves produced a more abundant, fuller-bodied tea, and this became Bai Mu Tan. Its name, "white peony," evokes the way the pale buds and green-gray leaves open in the cup like petals. Production follows the same gentle sequence as Silver Needle: sun or warm-air withering, light piling in some styles, and low-temperature drying. The result is a sweeter, rounder drink than its plain appearance suggests.[2]
A place in the white tea hierarchy and early export
Chinese merchants sort white teas into four grades by plucking style. Silver Needle is buds alone. Bai Mu Tan is usually one bud with two leaves. Gongmei carries more leaf, and Shoumei is mostly leaf with few buds. This ladder let drinkers choose between ethereal delicacy and a more robust, everyday brew, with Bai Mu Tan as the balanced middle. When Fujian whites reached English-speaking markets in the late nineteenth century, they were poorly understood. They were at first even classed with black teas because they skipped the steaming used for green tea. They were sold under loose descriptors such as Silvery Tip Pekoe, China White, or Fujian White rather than by their Chinese grade names.[3]
Brewing with skill: gaiwan and gongfu practice
In southern China, Bai Mu Tan is most often drunk plain, steeped in a lidded gaiwan or a small teapot in the manner of gongfu brewing. This careful style of preparation is associated with Fujian and the Chaoshan region of Guangdong. It uses a generous leaf-to-water ratio and short, repeated infusions shared from a pitcher so that every cup tastes the same. For white tea, practitioners favor water well below a full boil, commonly around 85°C, to coax out sweetness without scalding the tender leaf. Because Bai Mu Tan includes leaves as well as buds, it holds up to many successive steepings, and its flavor shifts from floral to honeyed over the course of a session.[4]
Leafier whites and the taste for aged tea
The leafier, later-plucked white teas show how the category can move toward deeper flavors. Shoumei, which is closely related to Bai Mu Tan and made from the same large-white bushes, brews darker and stronger, and is sometimes compared with light oolong. In recent decades Chinese drinkers have embraced the idea that white teas, including Bai Mu Tan, improve with years of dry storage. Over time they develop mellow notes of dried fruit and wood. This has encouraged the pressing of Bai Mu Tan into cakes for keeping. It has also encouraged the practice of simmering or long-steeping older leaf into a rich, sweet infusion, a very different drink from the fresh tea's light floral cup.[5]
A national and international tea culture
Bai Mu Tan belongs to a much older Chinese culture in which tea served as social beverage, monastic aid to wakefulness, gift, and tribute. That culture shaped how tea was brewed and shared across East Asia and, later, far beyond. Within that tradition, white peony tea is valued as an expression of restraint: minimal processing, careful water, and attentive tasting. Over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, white tea production in the Bai Mu Tan style spread beyond Fujian. Producers in Taiwan, Nepal, Darjeeling and elsewhere in northeast India, Sri Lanka, and Thailand now make comparable bud-and-leaf whites for an international audience.[6]
Contemporary uses in low- and no-alcohol drinks
Today Bai Mu Tan is one of the most widely available white teas in specialty tea shops worldwide, and its uses have widened well beyond the teacup. Its gentle body and low bitterness make it a favored base for cold brew and iced tea, and for blends scented with jasmine, rose, stone fruit, or citrus. Kombucha brewers and other makers of fermented tea drinks value it for a lighter, more floral result than black or green tea gives. Bartenders building non-alcoholic menus use concentrated white peony infusions or syrups to add soft tannin and aroma to spritzes and sours. Its caffeine content varies widely and is often modest, which suits it to these light, everyday and evening drinks.[3]
Part of White Tea
References
- [1]EncyclopediaTea processing — Wikipedia↑§1
- [2]EncyclopediaBaihao Yinzhen — Wikipedia↑§2
- [3]EncyclopediaWhite tea — Wikipedia↑§3↑§7
- [4]EncyclopediaGongfu tea — Wikipedia↑§4
- [5]EncyclopediaShoumei tea — Wikipedia↑§5
- [6]EncyclopediaChinese tea culture — Wikipedia↑§6
- [7]ProducerNino Discovery Set 1 (ninodrinks.com)↑prepared
- [8]Product informationSparkling White Tea-Bergamotte - Saveur Drinks | VINELLO↑prepared
- [9]ProducerWhite Tea Bergamotte 075l (saveur-drinks.de)↑prepared
- [10]Product informationSKBI - Bloom↑prepared
- [11]ProducerProxies Blanc Slate (drinkproxies.com)↑prepared