Jasmine Pearls (Mo Li Hua Long Zhu)

This one was included as a generous sample with my recent order. It is a very pleasant jasmine pearl. Not heavily perfumed but certainly enough to impart good, strong jasmine flavor. Clean and mellow.

Sipdown!
I work very hard, probably the hardest of anyone I know, too hard if you ask me. I feel like sitting and sampling teas in chinese fashion at a tea shop in china town is well deserved. So I go to the ‘International district’ in Seattle with my old friend and ask for the gongfu cha? The tea proprietor say in chinese ’ what you want to drink’ now I am no stranger to mandarin but I could not understand her to save my life so we just started speaking in good ol english.
To my surprise she actually had two teas she was sampling, one a aged loose leaf shu puer, and the other dragonwell green. Long story short, the tea was delicious and I had to buy zhen zhu jasmine pearl tea.
I have been exclusive to loose leaf tea for ten years, and yet the sound of the pearls dropping into the pot makes me happy.
It’s fine when you’ve steeped it long enough, I probably drank the rinse with this one because I assumed the leaves would react with the hot water faster than they did. I personally don’t mind drinking this closer to room temp. The smell of jasmine flower and the mellow tea makes for a sweet cup, simple and lovely.
I dedicated the last of the bag to a time when I really need a grade A tea so while I drank it all pretty quick there’s still a 10grams left.
I keep thinking I’ll go back to Seattle for a refill but it’s just too hard to find a place to stay, even though my friend lives there and I crashed with her once. She of course had tea with me out of curiosity rather than obsession, so I might have to find a tea place closer to SPokane. I still have to thank New Century Tea Gallery for the aposite service to me and my friend at our one on one high school reunion.