Bi Luo Chun / Green Snail Spring Green Tea Grade A

Code: G19A011

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Packaging Information:
Packed in 50g units / 5g SAMPLE also available

A limited edition of very fine Bi Luo Chun from 2009 harvest. A unique, superior tea with a lot to discover and appreciate. The tea features a light-green leaf that yields a rich brew with a striking sweetness, and powerful fresh taste.

Bi Luo Chun is one of China's rare green teas of exceptional quality, known all over the world. It can be planted on only two mountains near Wuxi. The mountains are often shrouded in mist, thus the leaves are especially moist and tender. Peach, apricot and plum trees are planted among the bushes. Blooming fruit trees produce a wonderful aroma, which is easily absorbed by the tender sprouts and buds of tea bushes. This unique aroma passes on to you with each infusion.

This rare tea is made only once a year from the most tender shoots of the first spring flush. The Chinese have developed special manufacturing equipment to process it. Plucking takes only the bud and a single leaf half unfurled, called the "sparrow's tongue." A kilo of Bi Luo Chun contains hundred thirty to hundred fifty thousand leaf-bud sets. Bi Luo Chun is processed by hand by the most skilled Tea Masters.

Other names:
Bi Luo Chun, Biluochun, Green Snail Spring, Dong Ting Bi Luo Chun, Pi Lo Chun, Snail Spring

Taste & Aroma:
Bi Luo Chun features wonderfully delicate and fragrant aroma with clean, fruity and flowery flavour. One of the finest flavours amongst green teas.

Appearance:
New bud and one leaf are plucked and processed by hand into neat little spirals that look like tiny snails. The leaf is full of fine white hair. Liquor is clear green to pale golden-yellow.

Origin:
Dong Ting Mountain, Tai Hu, Jiangsu Province, China
Mt. Dongting is a peninsula stretched into Tai Lake, the third biggest freshwater lake in China. With 1,300 years of tea-cultivation, its porous soil, favourable climate, high annual rainfall, and misty vapour from the lake provides optimal growing conditions for tea.

Harvest Period:
The harvest starts from the beginning of March, when leaf bud is about three quarters of an inch long.

The legend:
For centuries this very famous, aromatic light green tea was known by the name Xia Sha Ren Xiang (Astounding Fragrance). A legend explains why. Once in the distant past, some pickers of a particularly good crop filled their basket before they were ready to go home. Wanting to carry more leaves, they stuffed the excess inside their tunics. Warmed by body heats, the leaves began to give off a rich aroma. Many pickers said the same words aloud: "I was astounded." Some time later, in the seventeenth century, Emperor Kang Xi visited the Lake Tai Hu area and was presented with this tea. He straight away fell in love with it, but considered the name to be too vulgar. He suggested a new name, Pi Lo Chun (green snail spring) because of the way tea leaves appear. This name is now known all over the word, for this is one of China's finest teas.