Jasmine Tea Bag Organic Fair Trade Green Tea Blend

I usually like Rishi Teas, in fact, I love their Matcha and quality of teas, but their version of Jasmine is a little too heavy on Jasmine, not enough green tea…there is an imbalance.

I am a Jasmine tea lover but this is a little too strong. I like to keep the tea bag in the whole duration of drinking because I like strong tea, but the Jasmine is overpowering.

You can tell this tea is still a good quality tea, but imbalance in taste.

Would I buy again?…probably not.

Again, good quality, but needs to have better blending.

Got this as a sample at the Midwest Tea Fest in the swag bag you get for attending. I usually give away the tea samples I get in these because they are almost always tea bags and nothing loose, and tend to be lower quality (broken leaf) teas.

I held on to a couple that I figured I might enjoy. Rishi has some pretty good loose leaf teas so I thought maybe this would be a good tea. And I should say that the leaves inside of the little pyramid shaped bag here are a mixture of whole and broken leaves. They are rather brown looking though, very dark, and don’t really evoke the idea of green tea much. The brew is the usual pale yellow green tea color at least.

The Jasmine aroma and flavor are nice, about what you’d expect. The taste of the tea leaves is not exceptional. I don’t taste really any vegetal or grassy green tea flavor at all, just a sort of drying astringent quality and a little bit of tart flavor aside from the jasmine.

This tea is about on par with the jasmine tea you’ll probably get if you order a pot at an Asian restaurant. It’s fine, might calm a hungry appetite a bit and pair nicely with some food, but on its own, it’s not particularly good tea and not something you’d probably want to sit down and just reflect on.

For what it’s worth, I’ve had better bagged teas from other companies, which is a bummer, because I like Rishi as a company.

This is a funny case—the opposite of Pukka—where sachets are being identified on the box as “tea bags”. In fact, I almost passed on this box, until I saw the image of the pyramid sachet on the side, along with a little blurb, “Introducing our Novel Knit Tea Bag”. Now I’m wondering whether this whole series of sachets is new to Rishi.

The material used for this jasmine green (which, to be honest, reminds me a lot of Sunflower Jasmine Tea!) has much coarser openings than the one they use for the Matcha Super Green. No doubt that is because of the size of matcha particles. Or is it? Now I’m wondering: why not use the smaller-pored material for all of their sachets?

This tea is heavily scented with jasmine. On the box, it is suggested that the tea has been infused nine, count ‘em nine, times with jasmine petals collected at night. I say “suggested”, because here’s how the text reads:

The sweet fragrance of jasmine tea can only be created in the traditional way, involving nine stages of scenting to deeply infuse the tea leaves with the aroma of fresh jasmine.

Is the claim here that any company which does not put its tea leaves through nine jasmine mating sessions is not producing true jasmine tea? Not sure, but I believe that a number of them talk about five or six jasmine-scenting sessions.

All of that aside, I ended up enjoying the second infusion more than the first. The liquor was pale gold and the flavor very jasminy in both cases. There is a touch of nice green tea texture here, but no more than I found in the Sunflower Asian market budget brand, so I probably won’t buy these sachets again. Of course, it’s worth noting that this tea is organic and fair trade certified, unlike the mass-produced and budget-priced Sunflower Jasmine Tea.

On the other hand, I do prefer the attractive Sunflower tin to the clunky Rishi box! The individual envelopes are expansive enough to hold four sachets each! I’ve been noticing that a lot of upper-middle-class (sold at Whole Foods) brands use disproportionately large packaging—usually boxes—which frankly is a big fat waste of dead trees. It’s supposed to convey a feeling of spaciousness and luxury, like going to a museum, I guess. In reality, it calls to my mind forests razed to the ground. But that’s another story…

It will be interesting to see how these sachets compare with the loose leaf jasmine green from Rishi, which looks to be the same tea, but one never knows!!!!!

Having grown up with loose tea, I usually don’t use tea bags. I buy drinks from time to time, especially at airports — usually jasmine tea. Rishi’s jasmine tea bags are the best to me — the taste is the most balanced and refreshing.