About the Silver Needle Trust

This office keeps the register of what was not done. The Silver Needle Trust is an independent body of record for a single class of tea, white tea: the leaf of Camellia sinensis that is withered, dried, and otherwise left alone. We tell you plainly what the styles are, where the leaf comes from, what the withering hours do, what the years change, and how to brew it with the least interference it will accept.

Why 1885

The Trust dates itself to 1885, the year the trade's own histories record that Fuding's makers first worked the stout buds of the newly propagated Da Bai cultivar into silver needle, retiring the small-budded local bush that had served since the 1790s; exports followed from 1891. The drying loft and the standing committee that convenes each spring to consider whether anything need be done, and has voted no every year since, are our own furniture. The date is real, and so is the work.

What we cover

One class of tea, whole. The styles and their grades: silver needle, bai mudan, gong mei, and shou mei, four names separated mostly by what reaches the picking basket. The two Fujian counties, Fuding and Zhenghe, with their rival claims and different cultivars. The withering itself, the one great step, counted in hours. Aged whites and what the market says the years are worth. Brewing, stated in temperatures and grams. And the health science, read carefully and cited precisely, or not invoked at all.

We keep to the lane. Every other class of tea belongs to a sister institution of the United Federation of Tea Taxonomy, and matters that belong to them are linked across, not written here. If a claim is not specific to white tea, it does not appear on this site.

How we keep the register

We give the measure, not the adjective. Every figure, date, and grading is checked against a real source before it is entered, and what cannot be stood up against the record, we leave out. Where the science is unsettled, we say so. White tea is the easiest tea to describe and the easiest to overpraise; we confine ourselves to the first. Tell us where we are wrong, and if the source backs you, we correct the entry and say so.