Good & Proper Tea – Jasmine Pearls
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Green tea is amazing, isn’t it? Well, this specific green tea is utterly amazing, but I wanted to discuss the amazingness of green tea in general first.
You see it’s still only about a year since I discovered that I had been making green tea wrong my whole life. I’d been brewing green tea with boiling water like some kind of idiot. Discovering that green tea leaves should be brewed at 80 degrees was literally life-changing. I had been eschewing green tea for decades because I thought it tasted bitter. Honestly the novelty of having a properly made cup of green tea really hasn’t worn off yet.
And the upshot of this relatively newfound love of green tea is that I get to appreciate really special teas like this Good & Proper Jasmine Pearls. This tea was given to me by my friend Rebecca and it’s the first Good & Proper tea I’ve tried.
There’s a lot to love about Good & Proper Tea: their ethos, their plastic-free commitment and the beautifully understated design of their boxes. (The half tea cup used as an ampersand is particularly pleasing.)
Also, if Jasmine Pearls is anything to go by, they produce bloody good tea as well. This tea blew my mind. There is one ingredient in the ingredients list (green tea, obviously) and yet it contains so many different flavours. How do they get them all in there?
Well, I know how they get the jasmine flavour. They explain that on the box: “The blossoms are scattered amongst the tea leaves at dusk, just as they open and release their heady aroma, and over four or five hours the tea leaves absorb their flavour and fragrance.”
There are also sharp fruity flavours and a rich honey sweetness to this tea. So I’m going to assume that they employ similar methods there. First, they roll some kumquats over the drying leaves and then they introduce it to some bees. Then they wrap the tea leaves in Spike Milligan poems and pictures of kittens to imbue it with some extra awesomeness.
(There’s a tiny nagging part of my brain telling me that’s not how tea production works, but given that my mind has been blown like an old tungsten filament light bulb, I’m not feeling prone to rational thinking just now.)
The tightly-rolled pearls unfurl with aplomb and this tea is very amenable to a bit of re-steeping. So I have had plenty of opportunities to enjoy this sweet, fragrant, flowery brew. And you know what? My mind isn’t yet any less blown by it.
Today’s featured book is Mark Leonard’s What Does China Think?
