jasmine downy pearls

[redbird]

The "Jasmine downy pearls" tea I ordered recently from McNulty's is good, which is a relief.

I'd enjoyed a different company (Porto Rico)'s jasmine pearl tea, but it was out of stock the last couple of times we were ordering other things from Porto Rico. And I'd been disappointed by the McNulty's non-jasmine downy pearls I ordered last time, enough so that I threw the rest of the bag away after making tea from them once.

But I decided to risk the money (the smallest amount I could order was a quarter pound), because there are days I want a not-very-caffeinated hot drink that tastes more like tea than any of the herbal teas I like. I usually drink black tea, either Assam, Darjeeling, or an Irish breakfast or English breakfast blend, and this is green tea, but it is tea, which matters sometimes.

(When we lived in New York I got jasmine pearl tea from Ten Ren, which was just north of Canal Street; I haven't found anywhere in Boston that carries it.)

Comments

[elbren]

the best caffeine-free substitute i've found for black tea is fireweed, or "ivan chai"

[cmcmck]

As a fan of obscure teas I know how difficult it can sometimes be!

[redbird]

I also know that sometimes things just stop being available, and sometimes they're around if I know where to look. Celestial Seasonings used to make an herbal chai blend called "Emperor's Choice" that I liked a lot. Then they stopped selling it for a while, followed by starting to sell something with the same name and package design, but a different blend that I didn't like as well. I think they've now done that a few more times, and somewhere in there I stopped even bothering to buy a box and see if I liked it.

In this case, I'm not sure whether the problem is availability, or me knowing where to look and what it's called. I wouldn't be surprised if it was available to a person who knew how to ask, but that "how to ask" required speaking either Cantonese or Mandarin. Porto Rico used to stock it, and if I still lived in New York I'd have been going into the shop, and it would have been easier to ask whether they expected to have it again than it is when we're adding teas (and chocolate-covered orange peel) to cattitude's coffee order.

[sine_nomine]

tenrenfinetea.com seems to be the actual company. They do ship. I know, for a while, they talked about closing the stores. I thought they had, but the website says otherwise.

It does look as if various companies are capitalizing on the name.

[redbird]

Thank you.

They seem to have two grades of the jasmine tea, one of which costs a little less than the McNulty's tea ($38 for 200 grams versus $22 for a quarter pound), but I don't know what shipping would cost if I just order that tea. I'm bookmarking this, because they're more likely to have the jasmine pearls in stock when I use up the current bag of tea than McNulty's is.

[azurelunatic]

Hooray!