2019 Skinnydip white tea is a 200 gram pressed cake with Simao material from Bitterleaf Teas. What attracted me to this white tea is the price, at this time, $14.50 for a 200 gram cake, so I couldn’t resist purchasing a cake. Skinnydip is flat out a budget tea for daily drinking or inexpensive aging.
Leaf and Steeping Method
Skinnydip has a strong scent of a sweet mowed lawn. The cake is a looser compression, making it easier to break off pieces, but also a bit messy as the leaf shatters.
I used 1 gram of leaf per 20ml of vessel size, gongfu style steeping in boiling water. Just looking at this cake and steeping it at boil seems a bad idea, but might as well test it. I didn’t rinse this as the leaf opened up quickly. The hot leaf smells of faint cooked asparagus and carnations.
Tasting of Bitterleaf Tea’s 2019 Skinnydip White Tea
First Infusion: Skinnydip White tea’s first sip is sweet and juicy, like juicy stalks of asparagus (without the funky), then the flavor shifts to a strong floral carnation note, finishing with a sugar candy sweet taste.
Second, Third, and Fourth Infusion: Skinnydip developed a more vegetal bite. The white tea sips in juicy asparagus with a bit of chard. It has a gentle floral aroma and a consistently sweet finish. Each sip leaves an oily lip, however, the body is on the thin side.
Fifth Infusion: At the fifth infusion, the bitterness and dryness started. Skinnydip white tea has the taste of cooked leafy greens and mowed lawn with a dry mouthfeel. The sweetness is mostly gone and the floral has a flat potpourri dryness to it.
Sixth Infusion: This is a super bitter stewed oversteeped nightmare. Skinnydip is strong, bitter, and mowed lawn nasty tasting. The sad part is the leaves have a lot of aromas left, so it likely has more in it, but I’ve overcooked it. Likely 200-205F /93c-96c would have been a better bet to put off the bitter flavor, but it was inevitable with the greenness of this white tea.
Comments
Bitterleaf Teas’ 2019 Skinnydip White Tea displays a whole lotta youth with the grassy and vegetal notes, all while having a nice level of floral and sweetness in the early steeps.
As is, Skinnydip is good to drink now if you like fresh white or green tea – it even survived my boiling for four infusions. This will take quite a bit of time to age out the green elements of this tea, but the sweetness would be of interest if you are looking for something inexpensive to age.
