Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Posted by Miss Neddy at 10:58 AM | Comments (0) | Permalink
Categories: Tea Jasmine

There is a fashion now of handmade tea balls with flowers sewn into the balls. Various blossoms can be used, but one of the most traditional and most popular is the jasmine flower. The jasmine flower used for Chinese teas is quite different from the jasmine flowers that Indians use to decorate and scent their hair. The Chinese jasmine is a much smaller blossom and its fragrance is more delicate. There are many, many types of jasmine. Don’t believe me? Check out the wikipedia list of species: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasmine

Jasmine teas may or may not contain the actual blossoms. You might be impressed by cheap jasmine teas containing a heapload of blossoms among the tea leaves, but this does not mean the tea is of a high quality. Once used to infuse tea leaves, the jasmine blossoms have no more fragrance and are essentially useless. Good teas may be matched with their own weight in jasmine blossoms three to five times to attain the desired level of fragrance, and the used blossoms are discarded. You can tell the difference by how many times the tea leaves can be steeped and not lose its fragrance. A decent jasmine tea can be steeped four to five times, a good one seven times or more, and the best teas can be drunk over and over again all day, the luscious jasmine fragrance fading with each subsequent steeping, but never entirely gone.

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