Jasmine Big Tippy

Vivid jasmine, soft sweetness, and a floral finish that keeps unfolding. Next to Jasmine Green it should feel plumper and more perfumed, not just “the same flower, louder.”

This is the jasmine that can stand a richer milk. It should still smell like jasmine, not like a white-chocolate syrup.

Fuzhou is the historic home of jasmine-scented tea. The city’s “hills for tea, riverbanks for jasmine” pattern, the Qing tribute trade, and the later factory grades (银毫, 大白毫, and others) are why “jasmine tea” in Chinese still often means a Fujian idea even when the flowers now grow in Guangxi.

茉莉大白毫—also called 茉莉大毫—was developed as a Fuzhou specialty tea around the early 1970s. The usual recipe is a plump, downy green-tea base from large-white cultivars such as Fuding Da Bai (福鼎大白茶), picked as spring buds, then scented with peak-summer jasmine, often through seven scenting cycles and one lifting scent (七窨一提). Finished tea should look fat and pekoe-covered, yellow-green rather than dark, and brew thick, sweet, and long. In Fuzhou grading it is a top-tier or specialty flower tea, not a bulk café base.

Fuzhou jasmine scenting was added to China’s national intangible-cultural-heritage list in 2014. In 2022 it was included, with other Chinese tea crafts, on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

The craft difference is the base. Ordinary jasmine green uses a small-leaf baked green. 大白毫 wants a fat bud with dense white hair, because those hairs hold scent and give the cup its thick, almost silky sweetness. Multiple scenting cycles are the other difference: more flowers, more time, more drying in between, so the aroma is in the leaf instead of sitting on top of it.

The milk-tea catalog we buy from also prints 茉莉大白毫 / Jasmine big tippy green tea. That card lists a shrub small-to-medium-leaf tea from Yunnan / Guangxi, jasmine fragrance that is “fresh and vivid,” and a lively, richly floral taste. So the name on the bag is the Fuzhou specialty name; the origin line on that commercial card is the same Yunnan/Guangxi base used for other café jasmines. We tell both stories rather than pretend this bag is a Fuzhou seven-scent bud tea.