Ji Bai “Lucky White” Green Tea (吉白绿茶, Jí Bái Lǜ Chá, "Lucky White Green Tea") - Ji Bai is one of a handful of rare green teas with “white” in the name. These are teas produced from mutant tea plants with pale “white” leaves that are low in chlorophyll, similar to how purple tea is made from leaves with elevated levels of anthocyanin. The condition has been compared to albinism in animals and these teas are sometimes translated as “albino green tea”.
The most famous of these is Anji Baicha from Zhejiang Province, cloned from a single individual in the 1980’s. The success of Anji Baicha has inspired many new regional “albino” green teas in recent years, including in the E’mei and Mengding mountain regions of central Sichuan.
We tried 4 different instances of these new teas with our old friends Ding Ding Xiang, a Sichuanese tea collective, during our Spring 2025 China trip. Ji Bai was our favorite of these - a very small batch, high altitude, hand-processed tea ecologically-grown without the use of agricultural chemicals (a prerequisite for our teas).
The dry leaf has a rich, sweet, slightly chocolatey aroma. The pale infusion is clean, sweet, and cooling, without the astringency associated with green teas. Later steepings have a brothy viscosity and slight umami to them reminiscent of bird’s nest soup.