Organic jasmine green tea

Real jasmine tea is not flavoured. It is scented, which is a different process and a much slower one. Jasmine flowers are picked in the afternoon while still closed, and only open after dark. The tea leaf, which is dry and porous, is spread with the flowers in the evening and left to absorb the perfume overnight. In the morning the spent flowers are removed and the leaf is dried again. Then it is done a second time, and a third, and for a good tea more times than that.

What you end up with is a green tea that smells overwhelmingly of jasmine and contains no petals at all, or only a few left in for appearance. If a jasmine tea is full of dried flowers and smells of nothing until you brew it, it was flavoured with oil rather than scented with blossom.

Drinking it

90 °C, two to three minutes. Longer and the tannin of the base tea starts to cover the flower, which defeats the purpose. It is the classic tea of a Chinese meal because the perfume cuts through oil and salt, and it works exactly the same way against Khmer food.

It is also the tea most people can smell across a room, which makes the tin worth keeping closed and away from coffee and spices.

A note on gifting

Of our teas, this is the one that reads as a gift without any explanation. Ask the shop for the tin format if it is going in a suitcase.