The balls are interesting, smell intensely of Jasmine as one would expect, and produces a cloudy peach-gold colored liquor. I may have used too much leaf (? but doubt it since the people I was sharing it with didn’t take any offense to it…) as the intense jasmine taste and smell is overlaid on a quite dry, astringent, herb-y flavor/feel that made it hard for me to pick out any other taste to the tea, although I wouldn’t call it thin at all. It finally dies down by the fourth resteeping, but the astringency increases to take its place and it becomes notably bitter at that point.
A disclaimer, though: This bag has been sitting in my cupboard for about a year (best by date on the bag was 1/8/16 and it is now a solid almost four months since then) and I am not typically a fan of Jasmine tea, this bag came to me as a gift from a non-tea drinking friend. I usually find Jasmine to be too floral, overpowering, and too dry to boot most of the time, which I found to be disappointingly true in this instance as well. in fact, I’d say all the things I dislike about Jasmine teas was compounded in this instance due to the fact that it was made with white tea and had less to tone down/dilute the crazy Jasmine element than usual.
Bottom line, between this and a standard Chinese restaurant tea, I’d probably pick the restaurant tea, but that’s probably at least partially because Jasmine tea in general tends to offend my personal sense of taste and maybe partially due to the length of time it’s been sitting in my cupboard, although I don’t remember liking it when I first got it either, as that’s why it’s been sitting there for so long.
Flavors: Astringent, Bitter, Herbs, Jasmine
