Longevity Eyebrow / Shou Mei Special White Tea 8 oz: V

This is loose tea, not bagged. One pound is the equivalent of approximately 200 tea bags. Shou Mei is a very fragrant tea with a very fruity, sweet, full bodied taste. This is a great tea for making iced tea. In Chinese medicine it is thought to be a very cooling tea, good for inflammation especially acne. This tea is very popular in Chinese restaurants in the south of China. The climate there is very and humid and this tea is popular for counter acting the climate. White tea is very different from other types of tea such as green or black tea. White tea leaves are plucked from a special varietal tea bush called Narcissus or chaicha bushes. Secondly the leaves are not steamed or pan-fired (the process used in green teas) or fermented and fired (the process used in black tea). The leaves are naturally withered and dried in the sun. If mechanical drying is required it is a baking process at temperatures less that 40"™C. Thirdly only special "˜two leaves and a bud"™ are selected. These leaves must show a very light green almost gray white color and be ideally be covered with velvet peach fuzz down. Sowmee is one of the lower grades of white tea, but despite this it has the properties attributed to white teas. The leaves for Sowmee are plucked during late April, May and June. The lack of processing and hand selection is evident in the leaf appearance of Sowmee as it is somewhat mixed and tending flaky and flat. This Sowmee has a more pronounced taste profile - almost oolong tea-like. Many white tea drinkers prefer this cup in that there is a "˜substance"™ to the taste compared to the delicate nuances of other white teas. Modern-day white teas can be traced to the Qing Dynasty in 1796. Back then, teas were processed and distributed as loose tea that was to be steeped, and they were produced from "chaicha, " a mixed-variety tea bush. They differed from other China green teas in that the white tea process did not incorporate de-enzyming by steaming or pan-firing, and the leaves were shaped. The silver needle white teas that were produced from the "chaicha" tea bushes were thin, small and did not have much silvery-white hair. It wasn't until 1885 that specific varietals of Camellia sinensis tea bushes were selected to make "Silver Needles" and other white teas. The large, fleshy buds of the "Big White, " "Small White" and "Narcissus" tea bushes were selected to make white teas and are still used today as the raw material for the production of white tea. By 1891, the large, silvery-white down-covered Silver Needle was exported, and the production of White Peony started around 1922. According to the different standards of picking and selecting, white teas can be classified as Yin Zhen Bai Hao (Silver Needle), Bai Mu Dan (White Peony), Gongmei (Tribute Eyebrow), and Shou Mei (Noble, Long Life Eyebrow). All of these white teas are widely produced in China. The highest-quality