aigolocym

Today I thought I'd make some green tea. I had some Pi Lo Chun green tea that had been sitting in a container in the pantry for about a year that I needed to finish, so I brewed some. While the leaves floated around in the hot water, I noticed some little white "hairs" on a few of them, which I had never noticed before. I thought at first that they were tiny bubbles, but the dry leaves had the hairs, too. So I thought they might have always been there, just part of the plant, but then it struck me that they might be a fungus, since the tea had been in the pantry for so long. I tried Googling "fungus growing on tea leaves" and found an article that talked about the contamination of tea leaves and coffee with fungus. It said the fungi could be completely harmless, affecting only the taste of the tea, or they might produce mycotoxins, which would be nearly impossible to remove from the tea (through boiling, etc.) and lethal even in extremely small amounts (like 1 part per million). The article is here: http://www.entrepren.../183311855.html Obviously that was somewhat disconcerting, and I haven't dared taste the tea. So, for all the mycologists out there, I have 3 questions: 1. Is it even a fungus? 2. If it is, can you identify what kind and tell me if it's dangerous? 3. If you can't, is there some way I can identify it myself? I would be more than happy to run a few tests on it in the labs at my high school, though their resources may be limited when it comes to identifying fungal species. :/ If you'd like pictures, I could post some, but I can't guarantee they'll be very high quality.