Fuding Shou Mei White Tea Cake 2013

This was in the latest batch of free samples from Angel at TeaVivre. Thanks, Angel! I was a little bit confused by this tea, is it a white tea or a sheng? Either way, I figured I’d try it tonight. The dry leaf is in flakes, since it’s been broken off of a cake. The leaves are a darkish brown/green color. The smell is amazingly honeyed with notes of sweet dried fruits and hay or sweet dry grass. There was nothing in the instructions that said how much tea to use, so I just put a few pieces in until it was about a teaspoon and a half or so. Steeped at 200 for 6 minutes.

Yum, the aroma is super strong raw honey! I also get the same sweet dried fruit and hay from the dry scent, along with autumn leaves and tobacco. I can definitely see similarities to sheng here – it has a lighter version of that eucalyptus/menthol taste that I’ve gotten in shengs before. Lovely roasted hay and autumn leaf notes, along with a slight grainy taste. It’s overall quite sweet and honeyed, yum. I’m getting a little bit of the tingly tongue and I can feel this tea’s influence on my heart rate.

Overall, very good and unique for a white tea. I’m not sure I would purchase this, since you have to buy an entire cake. I guess technically I could just buy multiple samples of it. :P

Thank you, Teavivre for allowing me to try this amazing tea!:D

This tea almost smells like a sheng to me but with an added freshness like a crisp early morning. The liquor is really quite dark and the cup is sooo flavorful. Talk about a malty flavor explosion! :D As the tea cools, it gets more of the traditional aged white flavor..hay-like notes with smooth malt to finish out the sip..it’s beautiful. And honey..there are glorious honey notes in here, too. Wow, this is an incredible multi-dimensional flavor tea.

Don’t let the brewing instructions catch you off guard..212 degree water and 6-10 minutes brew time for this WHITE tea is oddly perfect. Teavivre has gotten the brewing time down pat:D

A huge thank you to Angel at Teavivre for another round of free samples! :D this is the first of the bunch I decided to try, as I’ve only had one other white tea cake (from Verdant) and loved it.

The dry aroma of this one smells much like a sheng, a bit woody and fresh. I steeped for 7 mins (!) With boiling (!!) Water! Very different parameters for a white tea, as it was recommended to do 6-10 mins, but hey I’ll roll with it! The tea brews up quite dark too, and the steeped scent is grainy and woodsy, a sheng crossed with aged white tea to me.

As for the flavor, initially I thought it was pretty strong, almost like a black tea! But as it cools it mellows out into a grain taste (actually a bit like hay) with some malt, a bit of astringency, and a sugared sweet aftertaste. Man, I don’t think I’ve had anything like this one! It’s a variety of teas in one – black, white, sheng..so interesting. The overall flavor is definitely of an aged white though, with the grain, hay-like notes and malt with a sugar (not honey) endnote. Also getting quite the little buzz off this lol, some good sheng-like cha qi!

Overall, this is an extremely interesting tea to try! I will need to have a few more cups to be able to fully grasp what’s going on in here lol, but it’s tasty and unique and I am quite enjoying this while sitting out on the deck with the fountain running. Today I felt a tangible change in the weather, a cooling in the morning, the difference in sunlight, saw some orange fallen leaves. The season of chai and lattes is arriving soon, so I will soak up the sunlight and warmth and enjoy my white teas while I’m in the mood for them! Don’t leave yet summer :(

Once again, thank you Angel for this sample! No rating yet because I’m on my phone, but this first cup feels like an 84 to me. :)

I’ve been enjoying a nice quiet Saturday morning in my pj’s, drinking tea, reading steepster, and a book which I’m close to finishing (California by Edan Lepucki) and enjoying quite a bit. My husband always wants to get out of the house on the weekends because he works from home full-time, but I love sleeping in on the weekend and having a restful day after a stressful work week. Fortunately, today he’s into a new video game, so I get to do as I like!

This is another sample I received from Angel at TeaVivre and I have to say, she sure knows how to hook you! This tea is fabulous, and the price for a cake sure represents it’s fabulousness. I’ve never bought a whole cake of anything before, mostly because cakes usually mean puerh, and I haven’t had much luck with puerh yet. The sample she sent me was quite generous though, so I’ll definitely get to enjoy more than one steeping of this tea.

I put about half of one of the sample bags in my 12 oz. mug to steep. It was mostly one large chunk of the cake with a few loose bits. I thought, do I have to rinse this? Nothing on the package said to, so I didn’t. It also, surprisingly, recommended a 6-10 minute steep at boiling. Wow! I steeped it for 6 minutes, and my first impression of the aroma was sweet mint. Mmmm, but odd for a white tea, right?

If I didn’t know this was a white tea, I would have thought it was an aged oolong. It’s sneaky like that! It brews up very dark. The taste is very similar…toasty with that touch of mint, but somehow lighter and definitely smooth. I detected a bit of hay too. Mostly, I decided this tastes like honey on toast. Yum! Definitely fabulous! Thank you, Angel!!