Pairing White Tea with Cheese
Updated Mar 08, 2026
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White Tea Pairing
Three tea friends, three white teas, three wedges of cheese equals three hours of non-stop eating and drinking. Sara, Georgia, and I met up to have our own tea pairing session at the French Cheese Board in Soho.
We paired cheese from France with white tea.
White tea is the least processed with almost no to little rolling and the leaves are frequently left out to air-dry. Because of this, white teas are lighter in color than green or black tea.
There are two types of white tea, one that consists only of the buds of the plant, and the other which is a mix of buds and leaves. The white tea leaves are harvested before they fully open and if you look at the buds, you’ll see tiny white hairs, making the tea leaves look white, hence the name.
We started off with the lightest white tea, a Silver Needle. This tea from China is all bud, no leaves so it’s rather delicate.
We used three professional tasting cup sets for each tea so that we all had our own cups to drink from.
Once the liquid was emptied into the cup, tea is displayed in the inverted lid, so that we could examine the wet leaves. During each step of the cupping process, we made sure to note things like appearance and aroma.
Now onto the cheese! (The French Cheese Board has every cheese I love, none of which I can pronounce correctly.)
We selected two mild cheeses and one wild card (a blue goat cheese) to see which ones would go best. Generally, milder, younger cheese works best with white tea since they won’t fight with the delicate flavors.
We would take a sip of the tea, take a bite of cheese, and repeat. For me, the Silver Needle paired best with the Beaufort.
Next up, a Nepal White from Royal Tea New York, which steeped a lovely light golden color. This tea had notes of melon and had a nice sweetness. I liked both Beaufort and the wild card, the Bleu de Chèvre.
The tea really brought out the flavors of the blue goat cheese and made it much more intense than when just eating the cheese alone. Once I had the blue goat cheese though, I couldn’t taste the Beaufort at all since it overpowered it.
The last white was Midnight White by In Pursuit of Tea, a much darker tea as you can see in the photo. With heavy notes of honey, the Midnight White paired best with the Brillat-Savarin, a buttery, triple-cream cheese.
The mildest of the cheese on the table, Beaufort, matched well with all the white tea, including this Midnight White.
Brewing the teas properly (weighing the tea, using correct water temperature, etc.) and taking the time to evaluate and make notes add so much to the tea experience for me.
These photographs are lovely. The color is breathtaking. I’m inspired to try these pairings myself on one of my next cheeseboards.
Thanks, Julia!
Love it. Also I have the exact same scale for my tea.
Hello Jee — finally posted a discussion of the chemistry of your white tea and cheese pairing on my blog. You can find the link to it on facebook.com/pairteas — love all of your blog, not just the tea pairing parts!
Brilliant! What a wonderful setting for testing and pairing life’s best culinary pleasures, cheese and tea ! Can’t wait for the next chapter with cheese and green teas. Let s see what cheese categories you will select to match.
Well Done!