This is a lovely white tea mini that I got from white2tea over a year ago, and still hadn’t tried. I was in the mood for something soothing, and white tea almost always fits the bill.
To a first approximation, white tea is as close as it comes to what we do to make herbal teas: it is, essentially, a dried leaf of tea.
But it’s not as simple as that. The higher end your white tea, the more work has gone into it. Leaves are individually chosen and plucked. For the most expensive white teas, it’s specifically the first two new leaves and the leaf bud at the center. The leaves are then withered (but not completely dried), and the process of withering varies from tea maker to tea maker. Then, they’re completely dried. Sometimes this happens by way of charcoal smoke; sometimes in the shade. Finally, the tea is sorted to make sure that every leaf is of high quality.
Dian Mei is a very good white teas: endlessly sweet, steep after steep. The feeling is calming, and the tea itself is immensely drinkable, with an aroma that would win awards if you could somehow bottle it as a room freshener. It’s not as expensive as the most expensive white teas, but that’s because it’s made with larger leaves instead of two leaves and a bud, and so it’s probably. Still, contemplating the tea itself, I can’t help think about how much has gone into it. I don’t just mean the expertise of the tea master who made it, or the centuries of experimentation that gave rise to white teas techniques that have been passed down as part of our human heritage.
I mean that humans make this thing.
That is one of the things that is most shocking to me about high-end tea: how much of it is processed by hand. Don’t get me wrong; a lot of tea is mechanized to some degree. You couldn’t produce grocery store quantities if it wasn’t. But if you want to capture something real, something evocative, something that is not ground to fine leaf dust and then extruded into bags, humans are going to be deeply involved in the process.
We are in an age where we see increasing numbers of people claiming that machines can do X or they can do Y, and in some cases, there is probably a lot of truth to it: machines can do more now than ever before.
But we still don’t have machines that can crochet. We still don’t have machines that can provide the precise gentleness of human fingers coupled with our discernment in finding leaves at the exact right stage to pluck and turn into tea. Machines can’t pick ripe strawberries or tomatoes: they both lack the discernment to tell ripe from not ripe, and the dexterity to grasp soft fruit with nimble fingers, one after the other.
We should, I think, really spend more time drinking in the amazement of what real human beings bring to us: so much of our food and drink depends on deeply specialized knowledge from people who have been taught by people who have been taught by people for millenia on end, with someone improving on it every generation.
We neglect people at our peril. We are able to dismiss those who sort tea, or pick tomatoes, as “unskilled” simply because we are so divorced from the process of it happening that I think too many of us no longer respect the labor that is put in.
So as I come to the end of this year, and the end of my teapot, that is my wish: to remember to respect every other human being as a worthy and talented individual. Because humans are amazing.
