Friday, June 06, 2008
Posted by Miss Neddy at 11:15 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink
Categories: Tea Other uses

A friend came to me in some distress recently, as she had bought a batch of white tea some months before, deposited it in a cupboard and promptly forgot about it till a few days ago. The tea had absorbed the musty odour of the cupboard (the cupboard though, she says, smells quite nice now - talk about an expensive deodorant!), and was quite undrinkable. Looking at the leaves, though, they were still white, crisp and fuzzy, so it was not an entirely lost cause.

I asked her to try microwaving the tea leaves as a last-ditch effort to salvage them. Use a very clean, very dry plate, place the leaves only on the plate and put in the microwave. Turn the microwave on to medium for about 2 to 3 minutes. Take out and sniff them. Repeat until the musty odour is almost gone. The downside of this method is that it “roasts” the leaves, so strictly speaking, the leaves are no longer white. The tea steeped from the leaves will also be inferior in taste, colour and fragrance. However, better a lower-grade tea than no tea at all, or a tea with a nauseating odour of stale cupboard. One can try this with wulong and black tea that have been kept too long, although one must expect that the leaves will no longer, and never will be, as good as they were when first bought.

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