About This Tea

Himalayan Full-Leaf White Tea by TETETea type: White, loose-leaf, grown in Nepal

How I got it: I purchased a sample of this from fellow tea reviewer Oolong Owl. She sent me 7g of it through the mail.

Where you can get it: Himalayan Full-Leaf White Tea by TETE is available online — the cost is $14.90 for 40g of dry leaf.

TÊTÊ White Tea… is grown and made by utmost care by farmers living at 6,000 metres. The garden where it is grown is magical. It hosts flora whose seeds make birds drunk. We anticipate that once you have a sip of this, you won’t fare much better.

How I Brewed It

After reading The Tea Lover’s Way to Make the Best Cold Brew Iced Tea, I decided to make this in my iced tea pitcher. (It just seemed too perfect that the author’s recommended white tea for cold brewing happened to arrive in my mailbox just a few days before.) I used 7g of leaf and 8 cups of cold water, and let it sit in the fridge for a day.

How Does It Taste?

The resulting brew from the fridge was delightful. It was crisp, slightly vegetal, and lemony — so much so that if I hadn’t made it myself, I wouldn’t have believed there was no lemon added to the mix. The liquid was a beautiful pale colour, like fresh straw. What’s more amazing is that my husband, who generally thinks that tea is “too watery” for him, enjoyed this and had more than one glass.

In fact, it was so good that I decided to resteep it! So I added another 8 cups of cold water to the pitcher and let it sit again for a day.

Unfortunately, the second steep was much less flavourful and much more astringent. It was also nearly colourless. However, I did manage to take some photos:

A glass of iced white tea from @handrolledinhimalayas. Very crisp. #tea

I also got a good look at the fully expanded tea leaves, and they appeared and smelled very fresh and lemony:

And here’s the wet white tea leaf from @handrolledinhimalayas after it was steeped twice for iced #tea.

Have you ever had green-tea-scented products (soap, bath salts, body lotion, etc) that smell really fresh and herbal, only to find that actual green tea rarely smells this way? I’m happy to report that Himalayan Full-Leaf White Tea by TETE, does, in fact, smell like what a lot of beauty companies think green tea should smell like. This was unexpected, but a nice surprise! The leaf maintained that fresh, astringent smell even after two steeps.