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The Tea Farm, located in Hawaii, explains that jasmine tea is made by layering green tea leaves and fully opened jasmine blossoms over each other. Apparently it takes six layers of alternating leaves and petals to effectively merge the scent of the jasmine with the tea leaves.

I have to confess that I did not know this. Previously I had been drinking jasmine tea with jasmine petals in it, and I had assumed that the petals in the tea did the scenting.

I decided to test Tea Farm’s Jasmine Dragon Pearl against the company’s description of the tea:

This jasmine pearl tea got its name from the shape of the tea leaves, where each individual leaf is hand-rolled and dried.

Actually it’s three leaves attached to a piece of stem that is rolled and dried. It definitely is hand rolled as I found a long black hair impaled in one of the pearls.

Back to the description:

Once you open the package you will be mesmerized with the beautiful aroma and this continues when brewed.

So I opened the package and took a whiff, and I do belive that I was indeed mesmerized.

This company’s instructions for brewing usually seem to be for the gong fu method; in this case they say to use 1 tablespoon per 8 ounces of water. I used half that much, and I was still able to make multiple   successful infusions.

The pearls opened slowly in the hot water, eventually revealing what I said above: this tea is composed of the first three leaves picked just below the third leaf.

I brewed the tea directly in my tea cup. The liquor was amazingly clear, and as the leaves were held together with some stem there was no fear of accidentally drinking them.

Now for that all important question: Did the mesmerizing aroma continue once the tea had been brewed?

For the first infusion the answer was definitely, “yes”. Even the second and third infusions had decent jasmine flavor.

In conclusion, I am a jasmine dragon pearl convert, in spite of the hair.

Roland Petrov