Five Nights with the Jasmine: How Our Organic Jasmine Pearls Are Made
A sublime fragrance rises over a tea and lifts you up, away from the mundane. This happens as a good Jasmine Pearl unfurls. The fragrance doesn't shout; it unfolds, the way the flower itself does after dark.
We've been thinking about that quality a lot this year, because for a while we lost it.
A short confession
Last year, as the tariffs hit hard we had a choice to either drop some of our premium teas or switch to conventional tea. We made the switch for Jasmine Green Pearls, hoping it would be a small compromise. Many of you told us otherwise. Some of you said it gently, some less so, and you were right.
So we went looking again, and this time we went further back along the supply chain, to a cooperative in Hengxian, in China's Guangxi Province. The Organic Jasmine Pearls now on our shelves come directly from that cooperative's own farm and factory. We are, frankly, delighted with it, and we wanted to know more about how it's made. What follows is what Su Wanglong, our contact there, told us, with a little expansion from our side.
First, a spring green tea
A Jasmine Pearl is really two harvests folded into one. The tea comes first. In spring, green tea leaves are plucked and processed as they would be for any fine green tea. There is no single required cultivar; what matters is the quality of the leaf and whether it suits the work ahead. Leaves with visible buds and fine downy hairs are preferred, partly because they take on jasmine fragrance well and partly, Wanglong admits, because they make a prettier pearl.
The leaves are then brought to a semi-dried state, supple enough to shape but not too moist that they'll spoil. This is where the hand work begins.
Rolling the pearls
Each pearl is rolled by hand. An experienced worker takes a small portion of leaf, usually a bud with a leaf or two attached, and rolls it into a tight ball. The pearls are then wrapped in cotton paper, which holds them in their round shape as they dry.
It's a step that's easy to overlook when you're looking at a bag of tidy little pearls. But every one of them passed through someone's fingers. After a period of natural drying, the pearls go through a final drying before the part that gives the tea its name.
Then the jasmine arrives
Jasmine is a summer flower. In Guangxi's warm climate the harvest can begin as early as April and runs through the summer, with the fragrance peaking in the hottest months. This is why Jasmine Pearls are a later-in-the-year tea: the green tea base waits from spring until the flowers are ready.
The scenting process, called yin hua (窨花) in Chinese, is where the patience comes in. The pearls are layered with fresh jasmine blossoms and left to absorb the fragrance as the flowers open. Nothing is sprayed or added. The tea simply sits with the flowers and breathes them in.
Here is the detail we found most striking. The whole scenting takes about five days, but it is not five continuous days. If the tea sat with the flowers that long without a break, it would overheat and the quality would be ruined. Instead, it works in rounds, each one governed by strict temperature control.
Scenting begins around 9 in the evening, when the jasmine buds open and release their fragrance, and continues until early the next afternoon, around 1 or 2 p.m. The spent flowers are then sifted out. The tea is dried, cooled back to room temperature, and only then is it ready for a fresh batch of flowers.
Our Jasmine Pearls go through four of these rounds. Four nights, four sets of fresh blossoms, four dryings. When the last round is finished, any remaining flower pieces are screened out. What's left is a green tea that carries the scent of the flower without a single petal. (A few stray petals in some jasmine teas are a decorative afterthought, not the source of the flavor.)
Why the process matters in the cup
Everything above is the reason a well-made Jasmine Pearl tastes the way it does: layered rather than perfumed, with the green tea still clearly present underneath. Shortcuts, fewer rounds, or added flavoring produce a tea that smells loudly of jasmine at first and then has nothing else left. Four rounds of real flowers give you a fragrance that keeps returning through the second and third steep.
It's also, incidentally, why organic matters here in a way it doesn't for every tea. Two crops, one field of flowers and one of tea, both grown without synthetic inputs, both handled by the same cooperative from start to finish.
An aside for the curious
Wanglong mentioned that some buyers ask for the same process applied to black tea instead of green. The result is called Black Tea Pearls (红龙珠, hong long zhu). We haven't tried it. If enough of you are curious, we might.
Brewing
Use water just off the boil, around 176°F. A rounded teaspoon of pearls (about 3 grams) per 8 ounces. Steep 2 to 3 minutes and watch the pearls unfurl. These re-steep beautifully; a second and third infusion with slightly longer times will still carry the floral notes.
Buy Organic Jasmine Green Tea Pearls