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Tea notes from my trip to China (part 1 of 2)

I’m back in the US now, and somehow forgot to bring my notebook back with me, so this will be from memory. I mostly visited relatives in the Jiangsu Province, which is a temperate area through which the Yangtze River runs. The local tea culture focuses heavily on green tea, and almost every city and town has a tea or two that they are known for. Many of these are lesser-known outside of China, so I am very glad I got the chance to sample them.

One of the best local teas I tried was a Zhenjiang green (I believe the name translates either to golden shoot or verdant shoot…if only I still had my notebook!). This was a very fresh spring picking, vivid green leaves, very tender. The tea is light-bodied, not very vegetal but slightly sweet, and you can just imagine the leaves soaking up the sunshine. [Edit: I realize this sounds a lot like my description of another Chinese green tea from not long ago, and I do find these two very similar.]

Another local favorite was Nanjing Yuhua (rain flower). This is a more vegetal green, light and subtle (almost white-tea-like in my opinion), with notes of what I can only describe at lotus leaf.

Most of the people I met tended to overleaf their green teas, but as I grew to realize, this was often not a bad practice. Much of the time, someone has a favorite green tea and a tried-and-true method for brewing it, and what looks like too much leaf to me actually isn’t. This was the case when I was given a cup of Maojian that initially almost scared me off with how much leaf it contained. But the resulting brew was not bitter or astringent at all, and had an almost malt-candy-esque sweetness. The overall effect was quite energizing, and something good to have in the afternoon during a workday.