Chun Mee

Good Chun Mee has tightly and evenly curved leaves, the eyebrow shape it is named for, with a jade-to-olive green color and a clean, slightly plum-sour aroma over toasted sweetness. Cheap material is dusty, broken, dull-colored and either flatly grassy or stale and papery, with the tartness collapsing into sourness. It is graded for export across a wide quality range, so the price and the look of the dry leaf tell you most of what you need to know. Because so much of it is commodity tea destined for blends and bags, finding a fresh, well-made loose-leaf lot is the whole game. Current-season leaf with a lively aroma beats a famous label every time here.

Chun Mee is historically associated with Jiangxi province, with significant production also in Anhui, Zhejiang and Hunan, and it has become a generic style produced wherever China makes export green. It is pan-fired (the roasting is what gives the dusty-sweet base note), then shaped and dried into the curved form. Unlike prestige greens such as Longjing, terroir is rarely the selling point; Chun Mee is a processing style and a grade ladder more than a single-origin tea.

Western: 80-85°C, 3 g per 200 ml, 2 minutes, 2-3 infusions; it is forgiving and does not punish slightly hot water the way a delicate spring green does. Gongfu is uncommon for Chun Mee but works: 85°C, 4 g per 120 ml, 20-30 seconds ascending. A glass or porcelain vessel is fine; this is not a tea that rewards fussy gear.

€5-15 (about $5-16) per 100 g for typical commodity Chun Mee, with fresher, better-sorted loose-leaf lots reaching €18-30 (about $19-32). If you are paying premium-green prices for Chun Mee, you are paying for the wrong tea.

Prices reviewed June 2026