You may not expect it, but April is the busiest month for us. On a daily basis we taste and curate new Spring teas and make decisions on which ones to stock. It's therefore also a crucial month for us to show that we can not only offer the best quality, but also keep it consistent throughout the years.
For premium teas, like the Jin Jun Mei, we always curate with some extra care. For this year we've selected a super fine Jin Jun Mei with sweet and complex flavours that you will love.
The dry leaves are just 1 cm tall with a gold orange colour.
If you're not familiar with Jin Jun Mei; it's a premium version of the Lapsang Souchong. The leaves are smaller and contains small hairs, which after processing gives the tea a yellow/orange appearance. The tiny leaves are picked in early spring before the Qing Ming festival.
Read our steeping notes below!
Round 1: 80 ºC / 175 ºF, 2 sec.
With a glass gaiwan we brew 3 grams of Jin Jun Mei. This amount of tea is enough if you're brewing just for yourself. When with more people, you can increase the amount to 5 grams.
The small leaves of the Jin Jun Mei tea releases flavour very fast. You can therefore pour out the tea right after you've filled the gaiwan with hot water at 80ºC.
The color of the brew appears gold orange and is beautiful. The taste is sweet with an aroma of dried fruit. The aroma is strong and lingering, and can be smelled also on the bottom of the cup after drinking the tea.
Round 2: 4 sec.
As the first round indeed showed that this tea releases flavour fast, we've increased the steeping time by just a little. Since the leaves are now fully unfurled, the second brew is incredibly sweet.
The combination of sweetness with the interesting savoury notes that emerge in this round, makes it think of a caramel cake.
Round 3: 10 sec.
The third steep is less sweet, but that's a good thing for those who doesn't like overly sweet flavours. The complexity of the taste comes now to the foreground. The aroma very interesting and resembles that of a Longan fruit. The texture is sticky and allows the aroma to linger in your mouth.
Round 4: 20 sec.
The fourth rounds resembles that of the third round. The Longan fruit taste is still strongly present. The sweetness is further reduces and slowly transforms in a grainy flavour.
Look at the leaves after 4 steeps in the gaiwan below. The tiny buds look wonderful and consistent.
Conclusion
After 4 rounds we aren't knocked out yet. However, we've a few more teas to go today and we don't want to end up tea drunk :)
If you're curious about how to approach the 5th and 6th round. Go for a steeping time of 1 and 2 minutes respectively to get the last bits of flavour out of this tea!
All in all, we're really excited about this Jin Jun Mei and we've stocked up as much as we can for 2018!