WHITE TEA - SILVER NEEDLES:
Boxes:
The conventional tip boxes are printed with silver printing. The Organic
Bio dynamic tip boxes are printed in gold printing.
Brewing: Important to treat the buds as green tea and use the lower brewing temperature recommended. 80 -90 o C (176 - 194 F). The amount of buds should be restricted for brewing to begin with and built up to your required flavour level. The buds are extremely fragile and should be treated with great care. The manufacture is minimal , no rolling and no normal fermentation process. The buds are merely left to dry in pans in the sun covered with foil for as long as 10 days or in a special room within the factory where heat is available from the dryers when it is raining. The result is a downy or velvet like long bud in a good dry period. When affected by rain the quality and price is much lower.
The conventional production tips come from fields treated in the standard way with fertilizers. Chemical spraying in this island is strictly controlled and only allowed in specific situations where disease outbreaks are verified. We only used 6 specialist pluckers for this work. The buds are especially grown in a separate small plot that has been planted with the special T2043 clone of tea bush used for this production. Only the long well grown buds are taken. Pluckers may normally pluck from 15 kilos to 60 kilos depending on age of bush and weather conditions. Here she will be plucking some 400 grms only in a day and therefore her bonus has to augmented and allowed in full. The leaves of this special clone are a deep purplish green in colour, rather than the normal green.
Packs available: 100 g Foil heat sealed 3 ply foil pouch - 500
g heat sealed foil pouch - 100 g White wood timber box and Mahogany hue Toona
timber box with gold print.
All our timber boxes are from genuine timbers and these are from licensed sustainable
sources, some from within the tea fields themselves where they are used as shade
trees and have to be replaced on a management cycle.
The Organic Biodynamic Tips are taken from an estate that is community owned and is certified Organic Bio dynamic. There is a fuller explanation in my Organic section on the website. Basically the system mirrors a middle ages form of agriculture using the phases of the moon. Not stocked as a regular item.
DELLAWA F.B.O.P.F. Ex Sp
Leaf: This specialist leaf is manufactured in an area of the island where the newly planted tea bushes, the prolonged photosynthesis of the leaves in an area that receives a great deal of hot sunny weather. The manufacture in this hot and humid area combined with cooling machines in the rolling rooms allows rolling to be carried out with less immediate pressure and for longer to allow the buds to emerge from rolling with less damage and also less expressed liquor from leaf cells combined with a large twisted black leaf. The black sheen of the final leaf is a direct result of prolonged photosynthesis and the silvery buds show as a mix or stripy effect within the final made tea.
Packs available: 125 g Carton pack
©Robert Wilson Ceylon Teas 2002