2025 Lahu Silver Needle Tea Baihao Yinzhen

White tea Silver Needles from young trees gathered by the Lahu tribe, northern Thailand.

It's difficult to determine the botanical variety of the trees. I’d guess it's Assamica, which over time has acquired some traits of wild purple trees. The needles appear bluish-green, but after the first steeping, they reveal red (purple) hues, as you can see in the photo. This is their natural color; the tea wasn't rolled or oxidized, just picked and dried as is typically done with Bai Hao Yin Zhen.

The most interesting thing about this tea is the organoleptics.

From the opened pack, the aroma envelops you in sugary-floral notes, just so intensely sweet. And then there's more.

The rinsed tea plunges you into the midst of garden flowers: peonies, roses, gladioli, and some flowers with sharper tones like lilac or bird cherry, intertwined with light pine or juniper hints. A very intense and distinctive bouquet of flavors, unlike anything I’ve encountered in Chinese whites. But even more interesting is that the palette is also unusual for Thai teas, which typically have predominant notes of tropical fruits or sweet flowers such as plumeria.

If you pause for a while, a powerful cloud of floral fragrances will accumulate under the lid of the gaiwan—ready to be extracted and turned into a perfume.

The taste is filled with the same sweet and piquant floral tones mixed with grape juice—after all, we can't entirely escape fruit notes. I’m not very strong on grape varieties to define more precisely, the only one that comes to my mind is “Isabella”. If you’re familiar with grapes and recognize it in this tea, please share your thoughts in the comments/reviews, it's interesting.

In the aftertaste, I detect clover, while my wife insists it's lungwort. I don't remember the taste of lungwort, perhaps I never even tasted it in my childhood, but I’m willing to believe in its presence, as the general line of meadow flowers is well traced here.

We got so carried away with the analysis of this tea's organoleptic properties that we felt like sending a message to the children: "Chew flowers, smell them, taste different berries and fruits—it will come in handy when you decide to become tea or wine sommelier, or something similar."

What's also interesting about these blue needles is the long-lasting sweetness at the root of the tongue. By the way, have you noticed that white teas often have a sugary-sweet aftertaste? Or is it just the Thai ones?

This tea noticeably relaxes and drinks incredibly smoothly, with no hints of dryness or bitterness if brewed with a bit of care. This is, of course, a great advantage of white teas—they fill you with flavor and tea energy, invigorate well, and don't strain you during the session.

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