Another one of our regional specialty teas is Kokang Green Tea. Kokang is considered to have the best tea in all of Myanmar. Settled by the Han Chinese centuries ago and a center of tea trade, the plantations here take advantage of the high elevation and their thorough knowledge of making excellent teas. Our Kokang Green Tea is a first flush tea, and is considered by many Burmese to be the highest quality green tea available to the public in Myanmar.
It is shipped as a full-leaf tea, so you may need to break up the leaves to make them fit into a tea ball, or use a tea strainer to brew it. The leaves themselves smell to my nose like good mushrooms with tiny hints of straw. It’s a very earthy and delicious smell.
After brewing, the tea itself looks almost the color of a white wine. It’s very bright and clear. The scent of the brewed tea is complex and delicate. The flavor of the tea has a wonderful straw flavor with hints of green beans, with a mild astringency. I could drink this tea all day. I recommend not adding anything to it without tasting it in its original form. It does not need any help from sugar, honey, etc.
Using full-leaf tea
If this is your first full-leaf tea, you should know that you can steep the tea leaves multiple times and get a complex range of flavors through the steepings. Depending on the tea, you can get as many as 15 steepings out of the same leaves! Between steepings, take the tea ball out completely and watch your steeping times closely. You can experiment with steeping times to yield different flavors. Some do it longer for fewer steepings, and others do it shorter for more steepings. It’s up to you.
Doing multiple steepings like this helps you to enjoy Kokang Green Tea for as long as possible. One package of it can last quite a while if you perform your steepings correctly. With a tea this good, you won’t want to waste a single steep.X
