White Cherry

Hmmmm – ok, nope not an Earth Teaze fan. This does not smell like cherry, it doesn’t taste like cherry, and I’m not a fan of the white base. I thought this was just a bitter white tea.
This was a good learning experience. I got to cross a potential company off my list. Thanks yyz for letting me experience these teas.

I bought this tea and two others frankly because they came in nice tins and I need tins and they were on sale so I can’t complain. However, this is supposed to be a Cherry flavoured white tea and frankly I can’t really detect any distinct flavouring or scent on the tea at all. Because the tea didn’t really have any fragrance outside of the pleasant smell of white tea, I decided to let it steep a little bit longer than I normally brew whites just to see if it did draw anything out, but really it seems to be a pleasant heavier bodied white with a few rose petals and a very few chunks of white dried fruit in it.

The base tea is from Sri Lanka and appears to be a mix of a variety of styles of white tea ranging from a silver needle style, and forest green crushed variety of white tea ( not really like a Bai Mudan as the leaves appeared to be folded) The scent off it is like a slightly sweet version of a lighter second cut hay. The flavouring adds very little fragrance but maybe it contributes to the sweetness. The brewed tea smells of a nutty hay, and peaches and cream corn with butter. It taste, almost like a mao feng white tea. It is nutty, heavier bodied, and tastes of butter, with fruity accents which taste almost like a cross between grenadilla and banana and pineapple, with maybe a faint hint of sweetness coming from the coconut. The fruitiness of the tea does not taste outside of the bounds of what is found naturally in some teas but may be due to the flavouring. I can’t say that there is anything in it that screams to me of cherry, but I do know that white cherries tend to have a softer taste. The dried fruit pieces did taste like banana it is possible that part of the fruity flavouring is from any added flavour and the fruit pieces, if so it is done very subtly. I can’t say I detect any rose. Underneath the nutty fruit tones there is a pleasant bitterness, a light astrigency, and a faint hay type flavour in the aftertaste.

Future steeps retained the pleasant fruity nuttiness, but became more astringent.

Overall this is a pleasant tasting tea however it fails to deliver on the flavour promised. As a plain white it has a very pleasant full and rich flavour but it does become astrigent, with more of a caffeine kick than my silver needles.