Moli Longzhu (Jasmine Pearls)

Scented Tea 2024

A full flavored jasmine green tea with a bright jasmine aroma. Bold yet smooth flavor with a lasting floral character. High quality yet affordable, Jasmine Pearls’ elegant hand-rolled pearl style leaves that unfurl gracefully into a tea sprig makes it our most popular everyday jasmine tea.

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Tea Origin
Fuding City, Fujian Province, China; Jasmine from Heng County, Guangxi Province

Tea Bush
Dabai (Big White), Dahao (Big Hair)

Tea Maker
Lin Xingxiong

Harvest Time
Early April

Plucking Standard
One bud, two leaves

A full flavored jasmine green tea with a bright jasmine aroma. Bold yet smooth flavor with a lasting floral character. High quality yet affordable, Jasmine Pearls’ elegant hand-rolled pearl style leaves that unfurl gracefully into a tea sprig makes it our most popular everyday jasmine tea.

Each round pearl is a hand-rolled sprig of young spring tea with one bud and two leaves. Though the dry tea contains no flowers, the tea leaves have been scented multiple times with real fresh jasmine flowers. Unlike teas that have been sprayed with jasmine-scented oils, teas made by this traditional method using real flowers have a long-lasting jasmine aroma that persists over multiple infusions.

For this particular grade of Jasmine Pearls, about 70% tea and 30% jasmine is used in the natural scenting process, which is repeated three times.

The process for making jasmine-scented tea pearls

A row of people in smocks at a table, each with a pile of unrolled tea leaves and a bowl to fill with hand-rolled pearls.
Hand-rolling Jasmine Pearls into their pearl shape.

To make this pearl style of jasmine scented tea from Fujian Province, the fresh spring tea is first harvested and processed as a green tea. Each pearl is hand-rolled into shape before the tea is dried and then carefully stored for later use as a green tea base. Fresh jasmine flowers will not be available until a couple months later, when the jasmine plant’s blooming season begins in summer. Scented tea makers will harvest large quantities of jasmine flowers when the buds are at their most fragrant.

White jasmine flowers scattered over a pile of Jasmine Pearls tea rolled into small balls.
Scenting jasmine pearls with real flowers.

They mix the dry tea leaves with freshly picked jasmine flowers and let them rest for several hours to absorb the flavor and aroma of the jasmine.  The tea is then meticulously separated from the flowers and dried once again to remove any moisture picked up from the fresh flowers. Making quality jasmine green tea this way takes around 2-3 weeks for the repeated mixing, separating, and drying. High grade jasmine pearls are identifiable by their clean, well sorted leaves, without any yellow fragments of dried jasmine flowers.

Green tea made from the white tea bush

Our jasmine pearl teas are made with leaves from the Dabai and Dahao white tea cultivars that are famous for their smooth, sweet flavor and large buds. Though they are most commonly made into white tea, their leaves can also be processed to make them into a green tea instead. The type of tea produced depends not only on the bush it comes from, but how it is processed after picking. Using these excellent white tea bushes to make Jasmine Pearls results in a particularly smooth green tea.

No chemical fertilizer, pesticide, or herbicide was used in the production of this tea. Click here to read more about our promise to fair trade and the environment.

Moli Longzhu (Jasmine Pearls) brewing guidelines

5 grams (¾ Tb) tea

12 oz 85°C (185ºF) water

3 min. first infusion

At least 4 infusions: 3, 3, 5, 8 minutes