Finally found my cake of this, it was hiding deep in one of my drawers that I don’t normally store tea in. There only seems to be a few sessions of it left, but perhaps I bought another cake of it and that’s hiding somewhere as well. I regret to inform everyone here, TMI warning, that this tea was used to rehydrate myself after a night of college drinking (for some reason I’ve always felt that white teas served this purpose best), so I never had the opportunity to truly get to know and have a fully lucid session with it.
The first infusion reminds me a lot of another Mei Leaf white tea cake, that being the wonderful Peony Chirps in all of its milky sweetness. It is silkier but less full of the exotic incenses and woods of the current Jade Star iteration, and the subsequent infusion does not help but give me the impressions of a mediocre Bai Mudan. Even in the Yixing, it lacks body, as well as the ability to differentiate itself from the rest of the Mei Leaf white tea lineup. Like Diogenes, with each passing steep I searched with my tastebuds for the complex character that was seemingly promised to me, but I was left in the dark as the flame of hope in my lantern fizzled out. The taste profile feels amateur, feeling more like a young tea than something aged in checks notes …. 2016 (!). That being said it’s still drinkable, but I wouldn’t say it’s enjoyable for the price point, especially with how competitive the white tea market is – don’t believe me, put this tea up against W2T’s Tiltshift (yes i know it’s a yue guang bai not a shou mei + bai mudan blend) and it gets blown out of the water.
Jade Star VII came out on the heels of the massive success of Jade Star V, which I was never able to secure a cake of. It feels like Mei Leaf rushed to name a successor as a means of capitalizing on what I’m sure is one of their bigger cash cow teas. Fortunately they seemed to have rebounded with #8, a sort of redemption.
Flavors: Astringent, Dry Grass, Milky
