A Flower That Leaves Before You Drink It
Shandong's Pingyin county has been known for roses for generations — thick-petaled, deeply colored, intensely fragrant, used historically in everything from wine to sugar to medicine. Scenting tea with them is something new for Baoputang: this year's first attempt at it.
The base is a high-grade Qimen black tea, made from spring-picked Zhuye landrace leaf from Anhui, finished into elegant golden-tipped tips with a mellow, sweet character — Qimen being one of the world's three great fragrant black teas in its own right, well before any flower touches it. Once summer arrived, double-petaled Pingyin roses went in at a 1:1 ratio with the tea, a single scenting round. After the tea fully absorbs the flower's fragrance and essence, the petals themselves are sifted back out, dried, and color-sorted away — nothing floral remains visible in the finished leaf, only what the tea kept.
It's an odd kind of flower tea: the rose did its work and then left. What's left in the tin is a black tea that smells like a flower no one would find if they went looking for it.