What is the best mint or mint alternatives to use in black tea brewing that can be used dry without any change in its flavor?

As soon as you add plants other than tea leaves, the flavor of the tea soup will definitely change.

Unfortunately, I may not be able to offer you a specific name of mint that meets your expectations for pairing with black tea, but I may offer you an idea.

Generally speaking, people mix and match other plants in tea, either for taste or for nutrition.（Oh, sometimes also for marketing.）

For mint, it is the same.

Maghrebi mint tea is made up of mint and green tea. Mint has a comforting and cool fragrance, and green tea also offers a refreshing and chilling sensation compared to other types of tea. In places where the temperature is higher, people expect a cooling sensation, so they prefer a drink that brings a refreshing feeling. (By the way, the coolness from plants differs completely from the coolness from ice.)

If you find the flavor of pure tea a bit boring and want to try a different taste, you could try “reprocessed tea”.

During the Song Dynasty (AD960-AD1279), the Chinese used to use neroli to fumigate their tea, adding the scent of neroli to the tea leaves. During the Ming Dynasty (AD1368-AD1644) people started to use flowers to fumigate tea. Up until now, the most famous Chinese floral tea is jasmine tea.

（The photo is of the jasmine tea-making process）

Making jasmine tea may be a little more complicated than thought.

Of course, you can simply interpret this as the tea leaves have the ability to absorb and the flowers have the ability to exhale fragrance. Jasmine tea is made by using a combination of both.

A high-quality jasmine tea will use 7 batches of jasmine flowers to fumigate 1 batch of tea leaves. The tea leaves are mixed with the flowers and slowly let the tea leaves absorb the fragrance of the flowers in a still state. When the fragrance of the batch has worn off, the old flowers will be removed and replaced with a new batch of flowers. The process will continue to be repeated up to seven times.

This is not an easy process. This is because the tea leaves must always maintain moisture content of 3.5 to 5% in order to maintain maximum aroma absorption capacity. Tea makers who make jasmine tea need to continuously control the water content of the tea leaves and also prevent water bogging down from the piling of the tea leaves and flowers.

At the same time, the timing of fragrance exhalation varies from flower to flower. The tea maker needs to master and utilize the timing of the flowers to exhale their fragrance to make jasmine tea.

When you seriously taste this high-quality jasmine tea, you can easily distinguish the difference between “pure plant” and “chemically refined flavoring”.

Different types of tea also require a combination of different flowers to match the most harmonious aroma and health benefits. For example, the Chinese usually use green tea to pair with jasmine flowers, black tea with roses, and dark tea with chrysanthemums.

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Cat and Giraffe