What happens when you combine robust Yunnan Black Tea with Snow Chrysanthemum Flowers? You get a highly complex and enjoyable tea both wonderful to drink, and to behold! Our Snow Chrysanthemum Flowers (雪菊花) are high grade fresh flowers and add an aestethic aspect to the experience as well as imparting a subtle spice and honey taste and aroma to the black tea. We blended several different grades of Snow Chrysanthemum Flowers before deciding on this particular type and ratio. Snow Chrysanthemum flower tea is a rare and highly sought after high altitude flower tea from the Kunlun Mountains in Xinjiang province. The tea is picked and sun-dried once a year then hand-sorted into various grades. We offer only the highest grade available! A lovely tea with strong sweet and spicy flavor, it can be brewed alone or with other teas (like ripe pu-erh). It's a great tea to drink after dinner and has no caffeine. Big Snow Mountain Black Tea is from Mengku County in Lincang, which is a high altitude area that's home to many tea gardens. This lovely black tea was processed with care from first flush of spring assamica tea leaves picked from 30 to 40 year old plantation bushes growing naturally at an altitude of 1800 meters. This black tea together with the Yunnan rose flowers makes for a thick and viscous tea, complex and interesting, while lasting many infusions making it a worthwhile newcomer to our offering here at Yunnan Sourcing! These Dragon Balls were made by my mother- in-law and father-in-law. They make them in their spare time. They use little pieces of cotton to compress them instead of saran wrap. Saran wrap compression is the most common method because it's faster, but it causes off gassing into the tea since the tea must be steamed to soften and is very hot. We use cotton, which is safe. Dragon balls are great because they are perfect single brewing servings, and because the leaves fare much better during transport and storage compared to loose leaf form, which tend to break apart causing the brewed tea to be overly astringent and/or bitter and detracts from overall look of the brewed leaves! 50% of the profits from the sales of these Dragon Balls will go directly to my father/mother-in-law. We will give them the money as a red packet during Chinese New Year, since they won't accept money directly from my wife or I. Most likely they will put most of it in the bank for their retirement! Each Dragon Ball is roughly 8 grams of tea (+/- 0.5 grams)
