Mo Li Hua Cha

Tea of the afternoon……

I still have a good amount of this, so I really can’t count it in sample reduction…because I am sure to finish all that she sent. This one comes to me in a swap with Dinosara from her continental hopping. Thank you so much for sharing this one with me as I love jasmine teas.

I don’t have a huge amount of information on this one. It kind of looks similar to a pouchong, but then again, I am still very much a newbie to green tea. Leaves are long and twisted with shades of dark green and a lighter sage green. There really is not much in the way of a vegetal taste like you would expect with most greens, but it does have the heavier mouthfeel of a good quality green. The jasmine is floral and sweet at the same time. Yum! I wanna go shopping for tea in China! Until then, I will just have to live vicariously through her…. Again, thank you!

Mug method with about 170 water and a 2 minute steep.

This is the third tea I bought at Maliandao in Beijing, at the same tea shop where I picked up the Tan Yang Gongfu. I guess I am in kind of a jasminey mood so I am having a cup of this brewed western style instead of gong fu as I had it when I first tasted it in the shop.

When I was tasting jasmine teas there, this was the mid-grade between the basic jasmine and the jasmine pearls. The jasmine pearls were tasty, but not super special… they tasted like lots of other jasmine pearls I’ve tried. So even though I went there thinking I was going to buy some pearls to bring home, I ended up with some jasmine green instead. I think this could probably be properly called jasmine silver needle as there are a lot of silver needles, along with jasmine petals and parts, in the mix. I would normally steep this at 180°F since it is a green tea, but having just followed Teavivre’s instructions to brew their jasmine silver needle at 195°F and reading Life in Teacup’s plea this morning not to brew greens very cool, I decided to keep this one at 195°F as well.

The resulting cup is very yellow, and smells so much like a full-blossom honeysuckle bush. I often find similarities between jasmine and honeysuckle, and I love honeysuckle qualities in a jasmine tea. Here, they are present in spades. And the taste! Better than a non-pearl jasmine has a right to be, or at least better than most non-pearl jasmines I’ve tried. So sweet, like drinking honeysuckle nectar. It even has a smooth, thick mouthfeel that seems like it should be more than only tea in the cup. As it cools, the green tea comes through more a little strongly, making me think that for western style I could drop the steep time to only a minute. Still, this is a super delicious tea.