While shopping for cheap tea at my local asian grocery store, I bought
some vietnamese jasmine flower tea for the great price of $1.29 for
80g. What I was actually looking for was dried chrysanthemum flowers,
which makes a nice herbal tisane. But I got my chinese mixed up and
bought moli cha instead of what I guess would be juhua cha.

In any case, the jasmine flower tea is nothing like the jasmine tea I
expected. The little white flowers have a completely different flavor
from the scented leaves I have had before. The tea leaves are big and
somewhat twisted, with lots of stems (not surprising given the price).
In thinking back, a while ago I was at a Hong Kong style Chinese
restaraunt and they served tea that they claimed to be jasmine. It
didn't taste anything like jasmine to me and I noticed many little
white flowers in the tea pot. Now I realize that it was probably this
same jasmine flower tea. While I sometimes find jasmine tea to be too
strongly scented with jasmine for my liking, this tea is more subtle
and I actually like its soothing flavor (hot or cold!)

Anyone have any knowledge of this type of tea and its relation to the
much different tea that is scented with jasmine (and which is often
rolled into little "dragon" balls)?

. . . as a follow up to my own post, I searched rftd and found this
series of posts on a very similar topic:

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.food.drink.tea/browse_thread/thread/8de7d0ceb...

I know no vietnamese whatsoever and don't know where to really start
with the vietnamese on the package. But the most significant words
appear to be "Tra Hoa Sen". Because I know some Chinese, that was my
focus. There are three Chinese characters on the package: Mo4 (has
grass radical), Li4 (doesn't have grass radical, but probably should),
and Cha2 (tea). There is no English anywhere on the package. Now I am
wondering if this is really jasmine tea or not.

Charles

What you had is flower tea, or hua cha. Like yourself, my personal
favourite is the gong ju, or tribute chrysanthenum, although I am no
expert. It is difficult to get hold of it here, although I have quite
a few directly from China.

The usual jasmine tea mentioned in the West is a jasmine scented green
tea.

They are entirely different, although may smell similar.

Does this help?

Julian
http://www.amazing-green-tea.com