Jasmine Wild White

Coming to us from one of our well-respected tea foragers, Mr. Fan, also aptly known as "Hunter," this tea is made from trees planted in the 1970's, then abandoned as people left the villages for coastal cities. They grew from seeds that were washed downstream by a river that runs through the middle of this vast, old growth forest.

Here, tea trees compete with a variety of other plants for sunlight. Thus, the roots of the tea trees extend deep into the earth to draw nutrients, growing slowly while accumulating these rich compounds in their leaves.

Preserving their wildness, the tea is crafted following local traditional methods. The leaves are withered slowly in the sun for roughly 50 hours, then air-dried for 2 weeks. This slow, natural drying allows the leaves to go through the full process of oxidation, gently transforming their astringent and grassy qualities to something that tastes warm, sweet and floral.

Along with white teas, the unique microclimate of Zhenghe County also has a reputation for producing some of the most delicate jasmine flowers in China. Jasmine farms in Zhenghe grow at 1100m elevation, in the misty mountains where the temperatures vary drastically and the soil is sandy and nutrient-scarce. These challenging conditions cause jasmine plants to allocate more resources to survival and less to flowering, making the flowers they produce potent and quite unique.

Mr. Fan has combined this white tea with dried local jasmine, pressing them together into small, 100g cakes. The combination of these Fujian treasures produces a tea that tastes woven together by flowers: threads of jasmine cross with the inherently floral qualities of the sun dried Shou Mei.

This tea is as stabilizing as it is enchanting. Much of it is enjoyed in its aftertaste, as we breath in the sweet, opal scent of the jasmine. While we brew it we enjoy watching the flowers reanimate, floating on the surface of the water. They appear much like how they taste: fresh, clean, and suspended in a cloud at the top of our palates.