White tea vs black tea: what is the difference?
White tea and black tea can come from the very same plant. What separates them is everything that happens after the leaf is picked.
How white tea is made
White tea is the least processed tea there is. The young leaves and buds are withered, slowly, until they lose most of their water, and then dried. They are never rolled and never heated to stop oxidation, so the leaf stays almost whole and oxidises only a little, on its own. The cup is pale gold, light and soft, with notes of apricot, honey and hay.
How black tea is made
Black tea goes the other way. After withering, the leaves are rolled to break their cells, which lets the juices meet the air. They are then left to oxidise fully, until the green leaf turns copper and then dark, and only then dried. Oxidation is what gives black tea its body, its malt and cocoa notes and its colour. In China it is called hong cha, red tea, after the colour of the cup.
Taste, caffeine and brewing
White tea is delicate: brew it below the boil, around 85°C, and give it time. Black tea is robust: 90°C and shorter steeps, or it turns bitter. Caffeine depends more on the leaf and how long you brew than on the colour, so neither is reliably stronger. The best way to understand the difference is to taste both side by side, from the same plant.
Taste both in Box I
Box I starts with exactly this comparison. Moonlight White, a white tea from Jinggu, and Dian Hong, a black tea from Fengqing, are both Yunnan large-leaf, Camellia sinensis var. assamica. Sessions one and two put them in your cup one after the other.