New Season’s Silver Tip
Our tea growers are expecting to pick this season’s Silver Tip Tea around the middle of April. It’s more like a natural birth than a caesarean section; you just can’t arrange a specific time.
Firstly, the tips have to be at exactly the right stage of development. The delicate buds, covered in silky white down, have to just reach maturity but not open. It’s a very precise art. Once the leaves are open it becomes a rather wonderful but ordinary tea leaf. The silver tips are so special because they are just that- tips- just the delicate little leaf buds.
This is not just for appearances sake. Its not style over substance or gimmick over flavour. Not open to the sun, silver tips have not begun to photosynthesise so they are extremely low in caffeine and tannin. Not only won’t you get the jitters even if you drink it all day but it’s incredibly sweet and delicious without the tongue drying bitterness of ordinary tea. You really can’t conceive that tea can taste so fresh and clean until you try it. And once you’ve tried it there’s no going back to black tea that has to be cloaked in milk and sugar to make it bearable.
Am I being an anorak? Yup, I am, but I just can’t stop myself.
Secondly, it has to be a clear sunny day so that the tips can be laid out in the sun to dry- White Silver Tip Tea undergoes absolutely no artificial processing- that’s all that happens to it- nothing else. If you think about what’s inside an ordinary tea bag you can see that this is not what normally happens. Normally tea is withered and broken and toasted and fermented and passed through all kinds of machines. White Silver tip is just harvested and laid out to dry, so it retains much more of its natural antioxidants.
With only one growing season a year the silver tips are incredibly rare and special. Only the most experienced pluckers can harvest them. Instead of returning from the tea garden with huge sacks of tea leaves they come back from a whole days plucking with just a small basket of tips. They are rewarded for their efforts not by weight, as with other tea pluckers, but for the quality of the tips.
Tags: white silver tip tea, white tea