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.
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.
Deeply roasted Northern Fujian yancha character, but otherwise a bit flat. Low astringency, with caramelized brown sugar and just a whisper of woody cinnamon beneath the roast. Fine as an everyday Rou Gui, though the roast carries most of the experience.
Floral, green, balanced, it does have that butter type note, decently sweet. It brews many multiple times. Overall, its a very decent Ya Shi Xiang at a good value.
