The Browning of Green Shoumei: Comparison Box

Welcome back to the new and improved Green vs Brown Shoumei comparison box! We have worked with our friend Wu in Fuding's Guanyang county to help us press a small collection of 100 gram tea cakes both in the green and the brown style.  It was after all Wu who first turned us onto this growing phenomenon.  Often called the "New Processing Method" or the Xin Gongyi 新工艺 makers of White tea have recently gone out of their way to take the fresh green leaves of white tea and process them to look brown and aged.  While this does change the flavor into something more iconically recognized as shoumei (read: woody, sweet, earthy), it loses the natural vegetal freshness that green shoumei has.  The reason for this is a complex interplay between market expectation and farmers incentives, it's easier to sell brown shoumei as aged tea, even if it is fresh! After Wu brought this to our attention, we wrote a blog post on it, talked about it on the podcast, and created out very first educational tea sa