Tea Review 79 - Rishi Snow Buds White

Snow Buds (Xue Ya), Organic White Tea
Rishi Tea

I've sampled assorted and sundry white teas before. I remember liking most of them, but nothing really stood up head and shoulders above the pack. But just recently I found myself really impressed with Snow Buds, from Rishi Tea.

This is an excellent white tea, or at least so say I, but I think part of the fact that I liked it so much had to do with my tea drinking habits lately. Which has pretty much consisted of a whole lot of strong, heavy black teas - Yunnans and Assams mostly.

To suddenly make a changeover to a delicate white tea was a nice switch and served to remind me that black is not the be all and end all of tea.

Rishi describes Snow Buds as "a rare white tea that is hand harvested in very limited quantities for Rishi on the high mountain peaks of northern Fujian, China."

As for the flavor, there's no point in me reinventing the wheel, when Rishi has already offered up a good description, "its clear infusion offers a fresh green note with a complex savory flavor and aroma that can be likened to toasted grains and baked sweet potato."

I don't know that I'd have been clever enough to isolate the two latter components of the flavor, but I also won't argue with that description.

If you're looking for a nice, light white tea, whether as an antidote to too much black or just because, you could do a lot worse than Snow Buds.

Highly recommended.

Image: Rishi Tea

tea, green tea, food, food and drink, Rishi, white tea

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Tea Review 76 - Inko's White Tea Energy

Inko's White Tea Energy
Inko's White Tea

Until now my experiences with energy drinks have been rather limited and totally unsatisfactory. In fact, the full extent of my experience has been about two sips each of a couple of the big name ones - which shall remain nameless and which really sucked, if I may be blunt. But maybe taste is not a key factor when it comes to selecting these products.

If you're looking for an energy drink that doesn't taste like cough syrup, you could start with Inko's White Tea Energy. Inko's also makes a quite fine line of bottled white teas, with nine flavors in all, most of which we've reviewed here at TGS.

Inko's White Tea Energy comes in an attractive, blue 15.5 ounce can and contains 92.4 milligrams of caffeine, which Inko's claims is "jitter-free." Since I'm fairly sensitive to caffeine, I decided not to test their claim by downing a whole can of the stuff. But I did taste it and found the taste to be quite nice, kind of like a lightly sweetened lemonade.

While I didn't really pick up much of a white tea flavor, it's nice all the same and it sure beats those carbonated Robitussin knockoffs.

tea, green tea, food, food and drink, white tea, energy drink

Only the finest imported teas at Golden Moon Tea

Bottled White Tea

I wouldn't go so far as to say that bottled white tea is becoming all the rage, but there's a lot more of it turning up on store shelves nowadays. Here at TGS we've reviewed the Inko's line of bottled white teas and Anteadote's quite excellent contribution to the sub-category. We've also remarked on - but not yet reviewed - Snapple's new white teas.

Now here comes another beverage giant to offer their take on bottled white tea. That would be Lipton, who recently added five new flavors to their Lipton Original and Lipton Iced Tea lines. One of the new varieties - White Tea with Tangerine.

If you're the type who gets all hot and bothered about the health benefits of tea, then you might want to take a look at this MSNBC article by Today Show food editor, Phil Lempert. It's called - Drink Up: White Tea Is Good For You — Really!

Image: Lipton

tea, food, food and drink, white tea, Lipton, Snapple

Tea Review 64 - Anteadote Pure White Tea

Anteadote Pure White Tea
Adagio Teas

Now this is the way bottled tea was meant to taste. If you ask me, that is. Not that you did. But I'll inflict my opinion on you anyway. Toss those sickly sweet tea-like beverages in the bin and give Anteadote a whirl.

Adagio Teas makes four different flavors of Anteadote bottle tea, including black - which I reviewed here - jasmine, green and white. Each contains nothing more than purified water, tea and vitamin C, which works for me just fine. What else do you need?

What surprised me the most about Anteadote White was just how strong the flavor was. I admit to not having a real wide experience with white tea, but those that I have sampled - both hot and bottled - have always been very subtle. Anteadote White has quite a bite, kind of a like a robust green without quite so much of the greenish flavor, if that makes even the least bit of sense.

Highly recommended. Down with sugar.

Shop For Adagio Teas

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Snapple Does White Tea

If you keep up with what others have to say about tea - and I guess I sort of do - then on more than one occasion you'll run across someone idly wondering if tea is the next coffee. Well, I don't know. Maybe it is - maybe it isn't.

If you wanted to apply that same line of thinking to categories of tea you could muse on whether white tea is the next green tea. Once again I don't have any answers for you, but if you look around you'll see more than a few companies trotting out new lines of white tea and promoting them as the healthiest damned thing since...well, since green tea.

But I digress. The point of this particular exercise is to briefly muse on the fact that Snapple, the 800-lb gorilla of bottled iced tea and the official iced tea of New York City, has moved into the white tea game. The company calls the debut of Snapple White Teas - available in nectarine, green apple and raspberry flavors - "the most ambitious product launch in Snapple history."

It should probably go without saying that much is made of the alleged health benefits of white tea, but there I went and said it already.

tea, food, food and drink, white tea, Snapple

Tea Review 50 - Inko's Lychee & Blueberry

Lychee White Iced Tea
Blueberry White Iced Tea
Inko's White Tea

I've never tasted anything flavored with lychee and I've certainly never eaten a lychee, at least not knowingly. In fact, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't recognize this particular fruit if the sky suddenly opened up and started dumping them on my head.

Having said that, I'll go on to say that Inko's Lychee variety is pleasant enough, if rather low key. As far as what to compare this flavor to I have to confess to being a bit stumped. Definitely on the fruity side though. I'll go that far.

Inko's Blueberry worked a little better for me but that's most likely due to the fact that I'm keen on blueberry to start with. The best thing about this variety - and I also found this to be the case with Inko's Honeydew - is that it actually tastes like what it says on the bottle.

As I was drinking this one I could actually imagine someone squeezing the berries into the jar and then topping it off with a bit of white tea. While I suspect that's not how the actual production process works, it's a winner nonetheless.

Recommended on both counts.

See my previous Inko's reviews here, here, and here.

Tea Review 48 - Inko's Honeydew & Honeysuckle

Inko's White Tea Honeydew
Inko's White Tea Honeysuckle
Inko's White Tea

Honeydew flavored white tea is a flaky concept, but it's flaky enough that it sounded kind of appealing to me. And what do you know? It works.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this blend is that the honeydew tastes like actual honeydew, rather than some chemist's half-assed notion of what it should taste like. There's also ginger, citric acid and fructose crystals in the mix, but all I really tasted was the honeydew and the tea. Very nice.

Honeysuckle lacks the sweetener and ginger and has a very, very understated taste, kind of along the lines of Inko's mint blend, but even more low-key. My clunky palate could only pick out the faintest of floral undertones (or is that overtones?) but that's not a bad thing, mind you. Just don't go into this one expecting the typical bottled tea explosion of coarse flavors and cloying sweetness.

Highly recommended on both counts. I'm not generally too keen on sweetened teas but I'd have to give the nod to honeydew this time around.

Tea Review 47 - Inko's Cherry Vanilla & Hint O' Mint

Cherry Vanilla
Hint O' Mint
Inko's White Tea

In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that I'm not terribly keen on vanilla. And though I like cherries I'm also not that fond of cherry flavored stuff.

So it's probably a foregone conclusion that I wasn't going to be wild about Inko's Cherry Vanilla - and I wasn't. Every time I took a sip I couldn't help being reminded of cough syrup.

But, to be fair, I should point out that if you're coming to this variety without my particular set of biases you'll probably feel differently. Inko's products, in general, have a rather light taste compared to many other bottled teas and drinks. Cherry Vanilla is one of their sweetened blends, but the sweetness quotient is actually fairly tame.

As for Hint O' Mint, well that was a whole 'nuther ball of wax entirely. I liked this one quite a bit. I suspect that the fact that it's unsweetened has a lot to do with it. There's another one of my biases.

Hint O' Mint has a very delicate taste, something that's quite refreshing - and rare - for a bottled tea. There's really just the vaguest mint flavor mixed in with the equally light white tea component. According to the label there's also some ginger in there somewhere, but my coarse taste buds didn't pick up on any of it.

Good stuff, tea fans. I'd put Hint O' Mint near the top of the list of bottled teas that I've sampled to date.

Recommended.

Tea Review 33 - Tempest White Snow & Apricot

Organic White Snow with Apricots
Tempest Tea

To make a good fruit tea that strikes just the right balance of fruit and tea is a tricky business, but when it's done right it's a thing of wonder.

Kind of like Tempest's White Snow with Apricots, which also gets a bonus point for the evocative name. A blend of an organic Chinese white tea with organic apricot pieces, this one hits the nail right on the head, if you'll forgive my descent into tepid cliché.

The fruit overtones are just about right, giving the blend a very smooth taste and a noticeable flavor of apricots that doesn't go too far and become overpowering. This is a very smooth and mellow tea with hardly a trace of bitterness.

Available in three sizes, from one ounce ($5.40) to one pound ($36). The sample I tried was in a pyramid bag that allows the tea leaves more room to brew, thus releasing more flavor. If I'm reading their Web site right, Tempest offers nine flavors of tea in this type of bag.

Tea Review 28 - Adagio White Assam

White Assam
Adagio Teas

White Assam. Who knew? Certainly not me.

I should preface these remarks on White Assam by saying that there are few things I like better than a good, robust black Assam. It's the sort of thing that makes me want to thump my chest, pinch the senoritas and shoot holes in the ceiling.

But White Assam doesn't go there, as you might have guessed. What you get for your 180 degrees and seven minutes steeping of these long, thin leaves - mostly grayish, with a smattering of white - is something quite different.

The last time I brewed White Assam half of the leaves hung suspended in the water and half sunk, which created a nice effect that reminded me of stalactites and stalagmites in a cavern. The leaves produce a light reddish-brown brew with a delicate taste and perhaps just the faintest overtones of fruit and malt. Overall, I though the taste was closer to a nice Darjeeling black, but what do I know?

Available, as most Adagio teas are, in four sizes. In this case, a sample size ($4) all the way up to a half pound ($38). Not for bargain hunters, but well worth it.

Recommended.

Contents: Sample tin
I paid: na

Tea Review 15 - Adagio White Monkey

White Monkey
Adagio Teas

White Monkey is, of course, a green tea. Nothing confusing about that, now is there? It's grown in the Taimu Mountains in the Fujian Province of China and is processed exclusively by hand. The leaves are small to medium-sized with a coating of fine white down that presumably gives this one it's name.

Now, I might actually go so far as to say that a cup of White Monkey makes me want to jump around, twittering and screeching like...well, like a big white monkey, but I would never stoop to such undignified shenanigans. However, this is a very nice tea all around, from the time you open the little tin and catch a whiff of that pleasing aroma, to watching the leaves unfold in the hot water - the agony of the leaves - to the pale golden color and the light, but very pleasing, green tea taste.

Like most of Adagio's teas, White Monkey is available in four different sizes, from a ten-cup sample tin up to a half-pounder that goes for $19. A relatively rarefied pleasure, compared to some teas, but if you've got the hots for the good stuff, it's worth it.

Contents: Sample tin
I paid: na

Tea Review 12 - Fuze White Tea

Fuze Orange Blossom White Tea
Fuze Beverage, LLC

Rather than take the risk of offending millions of Southerners, not to mention a host of tea drinkers abroad, I'll refrain from stating that sweetened tea is an abomination. But that doesn't mean I won't be thinking it.

The first thing you notice about Fuze teas - they also make a green variety - is the nifty keeno bottle and the not so shabby packaging. The second thing you notice is that they're really going after the "tea as health tonic" demographic. The majority of the packaging is devoted to touting the praises of the many polyphenols and vitamins contained therein. By golly, one eighteen ounce bottle of this stuff contains as many antioxidants as three whole servings of vegetables! Whee!

But I think I'd rather go with the vegetables - unless there are lima beans involved. Because the third thing I noticed about Fuze white is that the neato packaging was a lot more appealing than what was inside. Though, if you're a fan of sweet tea, your mileage is likely to vary.

In addition to filtered water, Fuze white's main ingredients are crystalline fructose, honey, natural orange ginger flavor with other natural flavors, white tea solids and white tea extract.

Which all adds up to a rather bland flavor that's kind of like weak lemonade made with oranges instead of lemons. Oh, and a slightly bitter aftertaste.

As for the white tea component, I going to assume it's in there, since it says so on the label. I didn't taste it, but maybe that's just me.

Provisionally recommended, to fans of pre-sweetened ready to drink beverages. A relatively good value, I might add, if you're into this sort of thing.

Contents: 18 ounce bottle
I paid: $1.39

Record Price For Kundaly White

Earlier this week, several Indian papers reported that a Kundaly white tea from the Kannan Devan Hills Plantation sold for Rs 1601 per kg. The auction was held in Kochi and the sale represents a record-setting price for this region.

For you American readers, unused to dealing with either rupees or kilograms, this translates to $16.70 per pound or just a bit over $1 per ounce. Which doesn't really sound all that impressive to me, so it may just be that my conversion is off. Hmmm.