Location: Fuzhou, Minhou County, Xiangqian Township.
Producer: Lvming Factory
Harvest: April 2025 (Tea); August 2025 (Jasmine)
Tasting Notes: Jasmine, Butter, Alfalfa, Hay.
This is a tea that lovers of jasmine, green tea, and white tea can all appreciate. It has the strong, sweet, stable perfumed floral aroma that one would expect to find in a well made jasmine tea. It also has the cooling crispness of a green tea, that can be felt from the first to last infusion. It finally has the same delicate and creamy notes down-heavy cultivars in Fuding provide to early pick white teas.
Fuzhou is one of the original homes of jasmine tea. The Lvming factory does it a little different than how it is now done in Sichuan and other areas. As has been true for generations, the final product is visibly yellowed from the four rounds of piling & baking it has undergone over several weeks. In each round, workers stack, flip, and mix dry finished green tea with fresh jasmine flowers. The green tea had been picked and produced in Fuzhou using Fuding Dahao cultivar bushes, then shipped up to Fuding, especially Dianxia Township, in the Summer to be steamed, rolled, and sunned dry agauin by rural women who have been undertaking this work for decades. The jasmine fresh flowers are picked in Fuzhou in afternoons of July & August, when the temperatures are hottest and the greatest quantity of freshly opened flowers is available. For each round of piling/baking, fresh picked jasmine flowers most be procured. Unlike in other production regions, flowers from the last round of piling do not usually make into the bag with the final product here.
This tea can be enjoyed grandpa-style, cold brewed, or even in a Gaiwan as some do in Fuzhou and Beijing.
it took awhile to get to Australia.
the tea arrived well, the name on the label was a great touch, very much like receiving a present from a friend.
I would have lived alittle more tea, so to experience it on more than 1 occasion.
The tea itself was very good, good flavours, good roast and excellent aroma.
When I first tried this tea I liked it, but it was only when I experimented with temperature and steeping time that I understood just how extremely good it can be, and ended up getting 100g of it. Now it's a breakfast ritual!
Dare I call this a hidden gem of the One River Tea selection?
It has a delicious sweetness and lip-smacking umami not unlike a good green tea, combined with a puerh-like astringency: clean and complimentary to the other flavours, it adds a moreishness to the brew that keeps me refilling my cup.
The tasting notes are subtle and hard to place, but I might name asparagus and a hint of dried fruits. This tea is very tasty and I find myself dwindling my considerable stock quite quickly.
1) Dancong is a tea that takes a couple of tries to brew perfectly. Only including 4-6g of some of the teas simply isn't enough. It gives the customer only one chance.
2) If there are only 4-6g of some of the teas, at the very least some sort of tried and tested brewing recommendations would have helped.
3) overall the choices were OK. The new varietal Mi Xiang was brilliant and the kind of thing you dream of in a tea club. The wild tea was unique, so just about justified it's place, but was such a small amount and with an average flavour. Including a mother bush Duck Sh*T Oolong felt like a waste of money. At that price, there are even better mother bush options on the ORT website. Including such a famous tea with such a cost contributed to the small amount of tea overall.
