Scent your tea with flowers

There’s fantastic fragrance in homegrown blossoms. Give your tea a taste of it!

I want to do something different for this week’s Leafhopper. Instead of a spotlight on a tea you can buy, we’re going to talk about teas you can make. I’m lifting the paywall on the essay that’s usually exclusive to paying subscribers, and adding a DIY guide to go along with it. We’ve gained a bevy of new readers in the past couple weeks—welcome, everyone!—so if this deep dive intrigues you, consider upgrading your subscription to a paid membership that will give you full access to future articles as well as Leafhopper’s archive.

Thank you, sincerely, to each and every paid subscriber who makes this project possible. If you can’t afford the price of a subscription but have a passion for tea and desire to learn more, email me and we can make it happen, no questions asked.

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My friend Leo Kirts and I were on the road in Boston last month to speak about queer politics in food media at Boston University’s wonderful Queer Food Conference. They, along with writers Jaya Saxena, Chala June, and Alma Avalle left me feeling uncharacteristically rosy about the state of food writing today, its bumbling corporate masters aside. The trip also gave us an opportunity to visit one of my favorite restaurants: Spoke Wine Bar in Somerville, where we sipped on this bouquet in a glass.

The cocktail was a savory blast of sherry, lemongrass, and spirits made from bergamot and smoked pineapple, elongated with club soda into a drink reminiscent of fine baijiu with a musky, herbaceous core. “Are these lilacs,” I asked bar manager Katie Weismann, of the sprig of fragrant flowers stuck in the glass. “They’re actually Korean spice bush,” she said, nonchalantly. “We pick them from the park across the street.” I couldn’t sip the drink without my nose burrowing into the blooms. Their aroma—like lilac, but brighter and creamier—brought a whole new dimension to the drink. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

The next day, I couldn’t help but notice all the Korean spice bush (Viburnum carlesii) planted around Boston, in parking lots and streetside garden beds, with their pastel pink blooms dotting the concrete. Had we arrived in Boston a few weeks earlier or later, we would have missed them. That’s the funny thing about flowers. They’re here for a minute, then they’re gone. The scent is momentary. Only your memory of it remains.

Unless you preserve it in tea leaves.

For most of my tea drinking career, I didn’t pay flower scented teas much thought. Fragrance is only one small part of a tea, and purists often deride scented teas as second class brews—basic beginner stuff, not true tea. It’s true that beginning tea drinkers often gravitate to varieties like jasmine or hibiscus. It’s also true that the very best tea leaves aren’t scented. But why should that stop us from enjoying good tea where we find it? One of the boons of working with Camellia sinensis is its capacity to absorb aromas from its surroundings. Should we ignore that quality, or learn what we can from it?

I love this positively perfumed jasmine silver needle from Fang Tea, and I love to share it with friends. Most jasmine teas use a base of green tea leaves. This version uses bud-heavy white tea for a smoother, silkier brew, and it offers a new perspective on the common jasmine aroma—higher and tinged with green almond, showing none of the bitterness of a green tea.

Scenting a tea with fresh flowers is painstaking work. In the case of jasmine, tea leaves are spread out on a workshop floor, then covered with jasmine buds. The white flowers pop open at night like popcorn in slow motion. Occasional hand turning and the night’s humidity help carry the aroma into the leaves. The next morning, workers sort the spent flowers from the tea, which is like separating a stack of needles and hay into its component parts. The leaves must sit in open air to evaporate off lingering moisture, or they might get moldy. Then it all happens again. A quality jasmine tea may go through as many as seven rounds of scenting. Breakage occurs every time the leaves are handled, reducing the yield of valuable whole leaves. The cost of all those flowers is substantial.

Most of the flowers used for scenting are as remote to drinkers as the tea leaves themselves. You’ve probably seen a rose, but how many roses have you seen that were bred for aroma rather than appearance? Have you ever smelled fresh jasmine on the stalk? How about osmanthus, gardenia, or lavender? Flower scenting is a clever way to turn a basic tea into something more exciting, thus making it more commercially valuable. However it’s also a way to capture sensations most of us will never experience firsthand.

During covid quarantine, I developed an interest in bonsai. I was stuck at home and needed a way to connect with living things, and I soon learned that flowering trees ranked among my favorites. Since 2020 I’ve raised (and killed) several calamansi trees in my apartment that greet me in the morning with impossibly fragrant blooms. They smell like creamsicles filled with nectar, and I walk with pep in my step whenever they’re around. If you haven’t woken up to the smell of your own citrus orchard, I can’t recommend it enough.

When you grow trees for bonsai, flowers are actually a detriment, as they divert energy from leaf and root growth. So several times a year, I have to pick handfuls of calamansi flowers to keep my trees focused on their goal. As an experiment, I tossed some in a jar with a nice Ceylon and stirred them around once a day. By the end of the week I’d made my very own scented tea with unmistakable orange blossom notes. It was good, like, $1/g Fang Tea jasmine silver needle good, and it existed nowhere outside of my kitchen. I drank down some of the stash and gave samples to friends. As the months went by, I noticed that the tea developed an enticing musk. The flowers’ high notes sunk into something darker, enhancing the sun dried tomato flavors of the base tea. I liked it even more this way, a good reminder that time is an essential ingredient in tea production.

For the next flush of flowers, I tried scenting sencha. I used a mix of immature buds and just-opened flowers in this batch in the hopes that their lime-y scent would match the green tea’s grassy verve. This was surprisingly good, too; the flowers brought a refreshing herbal character and fruity warmth to the tea. Later I mixed more citrus flowers with some first flush Darjeeling I had lying around. The tea was two or three years old, so not the freshest, but still drinkable, and the flowers added an oily richness to the brew that worked with its crisp, Alpine qualities. A nice way to freshen up a tea that would have otherwise hung around the back of my cabinet.

Not all of my attempts have been successful. Some locally picked redbud flowers added pretty flecks of pink to a baozhong oolong, but little fragrance. The honey sweetness of flowers from my own tea plant didn’t translate well into another batch of black tea. But as flowers come into bloom this spring, I have some targets: dandelions from untrodden green spaces, linden flowers from the trees on my block, lilacs, honeysuckle, and whatever remaining magnolias I can scrounge up. If I lived near a cherry tree with fragrant blossoms, I’d pick some to scent a batch of gyokuro.

My little experiments have been potent reminders that tea isn’t a commodity fashioned in far-off places. It’s a product of the earth, from elements of nature that grow all around us, which we can realize if we pay enough attention and respect to look. Like the Korean spice bush that garnished my cocktail, these DIY scented teas feel ephemeral and immediate to me in a way that commercially available versions do not. I can get jasmine tea anywhere, but orange blossom is harder to find. I can only imagine the possibilities for those with home gardens, such as a house tea blended with your own ecosystem of flowers.

There are so many fragrant edible flowers out there, and only a few are commonly used for scenting tea. What potential tea traditions might be lurking in our own backyards with species that grow close to us? What qualities might they draw out of teas we think we know all about? Scenting your own tea with local flowers might not make a prize winning batch at first, but it will deepen your relationship with the tea you drink and the plants that grow all around you, and that work belongs in any tea practice.

About four ounces of first flush Darjeeling tea with the remains of the calamansi flowers that scented them

How to scent your own tea with flowers

You may not have a citrus tree growing in your apartment, but you can find fragrant flowers everywhere. For best results, work with flowers you know and have some kind of relationship with. The experience should be personal. When searching for flowers, keep a few things in mind:

• Only use confirmed edible flowers in your scenting. Even though you’ll be sorting the flowers from the finished tea, stray particles will stick around, and it’s not worth getting sick.

• If you’re picking flowers from the wild, foraging rules apply. Only pick from abundant patches and just a few from each cluster. Avoid areas that might be sprayed by landscapers and soil that’s susceptible to runoff from roads.

• Fresh flowers will yield best results. You can find a lot at farmers markets this time of year. But some dried varieties will work as well, especially lavender.

To start, choose a looseleaf tea you enjoy and are familiar with, so you can tell what difference the flowers make. Two to four ounces is good for starting out. Place the tea in a jar or lidded container and add your flowers. You’re going to “long steep” this with a single round of scenting, so you won’t need many flowers, just enough to dot the tea here and there. Gently mix the tea and flowers together and cover the jar loosely. A tight seal will trap moisture and encourage mold. Store the jar in a dark place and give the tea a gentle mix once a day, removing the lid to let moisture evaporate. Repeat for three to five days. You can see if the tea is “done” by steeping a test brew.

Once your flowers have given up their essence, they’ll look shriveled and unseemly. Professional scenters usually sort out the flowers from the tea for this reason. If you’ve seen a tea blend with dried flowers in it, those were likely dried separately and added to the tea for aesthetics more than flavor. Spread the tea out on a clean surface to make an even layer and get to sorting! A chopstick helps move the tea around while minimizing breakage. This is the hardest part of the tea scenting process, and should give you an appreciation for the people who do this at scale. Many hands make tea!

Store your sorted scented tea in an airtight container away from light and heat, the same as any other tea. You may notice the flavors and aromas evolve in the coming weeks and months. Keep tasting to see what “ripeness” you prefer for your brew and keep notes for the next batch.

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