Hailing from the Fujian Province is the graceful Bai Mu Dan or Pai Mu Tan tea, which means “white peony” in Chinese. Royal White Peony tea is enjoyed by steeping a single bud and two leaves. Tealicious and delicate, the petals gently unfurl as leaves swirl in an elegant dance inside my teapot.
Time floats on leaves of love… With every sip, I drift in a sea of peonies to an exquisite melody of soft, warm, and fruity flavor notes. Royal White Peony will transport you directly to the beauty of art, life, and love that is boundless within each of us.
“In your light, I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.”
– Rumi
To find further respite in your day, I highly recommend using a glass teapot so you can enjoy the dance of the white peony leaves.
Instructions:
- Boil fresh water
- Warm your tea vessel
- Add 1 -2 spoons of Royal White Peony
- Steep for 4-7 minutes
The Royal White Peony is available at David’s Tea.
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As always Jennifer, your designs are delightful.
I was under the impression that white tea required a lower boiling point than even green tea. I’d welcome hearing from others about this.
Cheers Michelle, for the enjoyment. I didn’t indicate a temperature, just to use boiling water to ‘warm’ the tea vessel, I usually let the kettle sit for a while, then dump out the water in the tea pot, adding leaves to the tea pot and the remaining water from the kettle. I suppose I should have been more specific. I’m just an artist who loves tea :)
No worries. I just want people reading the blog to get a better idea about the temperature issues for white tea. I suspect most people do as you do and simply let the water sit a bit. My goal is to insure that each and every cup of tea is as delicious as it can be. Getting the temperature right is an important factor of that mix with brewing time and excellent whole leaf tea being the other components for an excellent cuppa.
From what my vendor advises you can use water between 70 and 100 degree Celsius if you use white tea and brew it very short in gong fu style with maybe 10 seconds steeping time. For western brewing with a steeping time of 3-4 min they say about maximum 75 degrees.
I’ve also read somewhere online that if you use an aged white tea cake you could also use hotter water to get the cake loosened up.
I wrote a post reviewing a lot of different brewing recommendations awhile back and they varied a lot. White tea temperature recommendations varied from 175 to 185 F, most typically (80 to 85 C). It was more interesting how brewing time recommendations varied, across parameters which mostly implied sources were discussing Western style brewing, from one minute up to five minutes (with some potential for brewing styles to be mixing or not clear in references). Combined with timing changes that’s a lot of variation in how to brew teas. It’s possible that using higher temperatures correspond to shorter infusion times, but it really seemed that preferences for different infusion strengths of tea were being expressed. White tea works best either very light or steeped to be as strong as black teas or oolongs tend to be prepared, using longer times, or somewhere in the middle, just depending on what people like. I’m not sure 175 F / 75 C is optimum across all personal preference range; individual likes also seems to factor into this type of parameter choice, and I’ve ran across individual teas that seem to do better using hotter temperatures for no clear reason. That post: http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.com/2015/06/tea-brewing-timer-standard-tea-brewing.html