Thus, what’s involved in Jasmine tea processing?
Jasmine tea is a kind of flowering tea, sometimes also refer as scented tea . Scented teas are tea that has the fragrance of other herbs, flowers, and fruit such as onion, ginger, garlic, rose, jasmine, dandelion, rose, and lychee fruit.
Photo courtesy of Steve. E
There is a wide variety of flowering tea, but one of the popular kinds is Jasmine scented tea.
Tea leaves can absorb strong fragrance very easily. Thus, scented tea are often be done by mixing the tea and the fruit or flowers of your choice in an appropriate ratio.
Often, the manufacture would choose a base tea to be scented. The popular choices are either black tea or green tea. The paring is also very important, for you want strong fragrance flowers to scent strong tea (like black tea) and mild aroma flowers to scent mild tea like green tea.
Green tea is usually paired with Jasmine.
In Jasmine tea processing, Jasmine blossoms are added into a bag of dried tea. The Jasmine blossom only open at night, thus only unopened blossoms are used to scent the tea. The ratio between Jasmine blossoms and tea is 3 to 7. This ratio reflects the purpose that is to retain the essence of tea while acquiring the fragrance of jasmine.
The bag of tea is them tightly covered. The blossoms will open and produce nice fragrance. The next morning, the old blossoms are removed and new ones are added into the bag. They repeat this process 10 times or more to actually obtained Jasmine scented tea. Tea that is scented the most also is viewed as having highest-quality.
Each step in scented tea processing must be done with great care. If any one step is done poorly, it will result in inconsistent taste and fragrance in the tea. One sip is too flavorful and the next one is too dull. This can really affect the quality of the tea.