2001 Jasmine Liu An

2001 Jasmine Liu An

Here's a little something different.  Recently picked up some Liu Bao/Liu An samples from Red Circle Tea.  I started the morning with the 1994 Liu Bao they're currently offering.  It was a nice, comfortable tea with a satisfying creamy quality and a pleasant cooling/warming sensation deep in the chest.  I wouldn't call it an exciting tea, but it made for an enjoyable session nonetheless.  After sitting with this tea for awhile I decided to try another of the samples I picked up, the 2001 Jasmine Liu An.  Interesting, yes?  I had no idea what to expect.  Opened the packet to smell the dry leaves and was hit with about as intense an aroma of quality milk chocolate as I've ever experienced, even from an actual chocolate bar.  Definitely a nice introduction for a chocoholic like myself :)   Upon rinsing the leaves the aroma stayed just as intense, only deepening to something nearly identical to baking chocolate.  Dark and bittersweet, but oh so tempting.  Where's the jasmine, you ask?  It finally made an appearance rising with the steam from the tea soup, mixed with a fascinating assortment of fragrances -- medicinal herbs, roasted chestnuts, a bit of fig, a wisp of smoke.

This tea turned out to make for a fun, if different, tea session.  I was surprised to pour it and find it very light in color.  A real contrast to the shu-like Liu Bao I'd just finished.  The same contrast showed up in taste, as well.  The Liu An lacked the dark smooth creaminess of the Liu Bao and carried instead a surprising dark roasted oolong-like flavor.  In fact, with it's chocolatey roasted aromas and aftertastes it seemed to echo a few aged shui xians I've had.  A good cleanliness to this tea, as well.  It seems to have been nicely stored.

I think the most fun I had with this tea, though, was in enjoying the evaporative fragrances from the bottom of the cup.  There were so many different and interesting scents going on, many that I don't often find in the teas I drink.  While the jasmine was present it wasn't nearly as dominating as I feared it might be.  Age seems to have mellowed and broadened it somewhat, and as for the other interesting aromas and flavors I'm not sure if those were originating from the aged jasmine component or the liu an tea base.  Probably the mixture of the two, I'm guessing.  The spent leaves included a few whole leaves in the mix along with plenty of chop, as well as containing a smattering of small round yellow seeds.  They looked very much like the little round seeds I found once in an "orchid puer" tea sample I picked up a few years back from Red Blossom Tea, which turned out to be quite undrinkable, although I just learned that this tea is meant to be brewed in a larger teapot, Cantonese style, and not gongfu cha like I had prepared it (see comment below from Peter Luong of Red Blossom Tea).  This Jasmine Liu An was quite drinkable in comparison.  I quite enjoyed it, in fact.

All in all, a very different and surprisingly fun tea experience today.  I'm tempted to pick up some more of this Jasmine Liu An just to set it aside and see what continued aging does to it.

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(Additional information)

So it seems that Red Circle Tea doesn't have a big following among certain tea drinkers, hm?  I don't like to put vendors in a bad light and usually just keep mum about teas and vendors I don't like, but we reap what we sow and this vendor certainly isn't alone in certain practices.  Claims such as "rare tea," "hard to find," "ancient tea," not to mention questionable prices, seem quite common among tea vendors.  Occasionally (rarely is probably the best word to use here) these are merited but often they are not.  It's definitely a buyer-beware market.  For most of us, it's necessary to educate ourselves by tasting lots of tea, including teas from vendors whom we know little about.  It's all part of the process.  No shame in tasting, testing and learning.  Never let anyone tell you otherwise!

I've since learned a bit more about this Liu An -- specifically, what those little "seeds" are.  Turns out they're not seeds, at all.  Neither are they related to jasmine.  They're the flowers of the Aglaia odorata plant, otherwise known as the Chinese Perfume Plant.  It's also sometimes referred to as the Peppery Orchid Tree, although it belongs to the Mahogany family (meliaceae) and not the orchid family (orchidaceae).  But this may explain why some teas that have these flowers in them are referred to as orchid teas, like the Aged Orchid tea I purchased some time ago from Red Blossom Tea (not Red Circle, although both 'red' and in the SF region), a tea which I didn't enjoy at all (most likely due to incorrect brewing, see comments below).  In fact, I had a hell of a time picking all the little flower balls out of the holes of the ball filter on the yixing I was using at the time.

Just as with this 2001 Jasmine Liu An tea, the Orchid Black tea from Red Blossom (which was listed among their puerh selections) was advertised as being extremely rare and a unique and special find, a claim which turns out to be more full of holes than that frustrating ball filter.  Apparently these teas are quite common and inexpensive in China, a point which MarshalN made and which others I've since talked to have confirmed.  Yet another good lesson in "buyer beware."