Fun of Tea Making

We need to go to the tea garden first, and pick the young leaves from tea trees.
Look how much we've done, it's not much, but our back is sour already!
You have to constantly rolling the tea leaves during the process of withering and fermentation
Lay out all the tea leaves on the big sieve.
You can start to smell the sense of the tea leaves.
Place the leaves inside of the machine for 10 minutes, in order to remove the water from tea leaves.
The main purpose of rolling is to break the surface of the tea leaves, and kept the juice stick on the surface of the tea leaves, and that's the juice you drank from the teas.
The rolling gently rub the tea leaves, at the same time it does not damage the tea leaves.
Wrap the tea leaves with cloth.
Cloth rolling machine kept the cloth full and tight, make tea leaves squeeze into a ball shape.
Look at this ball-shaped cloth; small, but plentiful.
After cloth rolling, tea leaves will became ball-shaped, now you will place them into Unraveil Machine to break them aprat. Repeat this procedure for 30 times.
That's how you get the Port Tea with all these hard works.

Though there are lots of species of tea leaves in the market, the making of them are quite much the same with only some different steps. However, the flavors of tea usually depend on these small differences to decide.

The normal process of tea-making is introduced as below:

1.Tea Harvesting
2.Withering and Fermentation
3.Fixation
4.Rolling
5.Cloth Rolling
6.Unraveling
7.Repeate the Cloth Rolling and Untwisting for 30 times.
8.Stirring and Roasting

採青

The tea harvesting is the process when farmers pick the tea leaves from the tea plant, preparing them for further processing. When picking the tea leaves, one should use the index finger and thumb to hold the middle part of a fresh tip, then cut it with the strength of fingers. The best harvesting time is between 12 o’clock at noon and 3 o’clock in the afternoon. For different kinds of tea, we pick different parts: some collect the top tip and the first leaf beside it, named one-tip one-leaf; some collect two leaves and is named one-tip two-leaf, also some are collected as one-tip three-leaf. Tea farmers nowadays also collect the tea leaves by machine. However, though using machine is more convenient and efficient, one can’t control the quality of the fresh leaves collected.

Withering The withering process is divided into two parts, “outdoor” and “indoor”. During the outdoor withering process, the fresh leaves are spread under the sun (unless the sunlight is too strong, no shading is needed) and will only be moved indoors after the fresh leaves become softer. Indoor withering is the next step, during which the fresh leaves are laid still for some times, named “setting.” Since the apex and the margin of a leaf are where the water evaporates into the air, the water in the middle of a leaf will be gradually transported to these parts. After a while, the water in leaves spreads even in every part. That’s when one could stir the leaves and repeat the setting process until the water content reaches the expected amount.

Fermentation

Fermentation of normal teas (except the post–fermented ones) is a simple oxygenation. All one has to do is expose the fresh leaves in the air. Each cell of the fresh leaves has to undergo the withering process before the fermentation. However, when they are gathered as a whole leaf, the fermentation actually occurs during the withering process. To fasten the fermentation, one has to stir and pile the tea leaves in the last stage of withering. Fermentation changes the fresh leaves by the following aspects:

Color: The non-fermented tea leaves are green, but they become red after the fermentation. The more they are fermented, the redder they become. It affects both the color of leaves and of tea. Therefore, one only has to examine the color of tea to know how much the tea leaves had been fermented.
Fragrance: The non-fermented tea leaves hold a fragrance closer to the smell of vegetables. The fragrance changes according to the degree tea leaves are fermented. For those underwent light fermentation, the smell changed closer to the flower fragrance. For middle fermented ones, the smell is more like the fragrance of nuts. Heavy fermentation brings the smell of mature fruits and once the leaves are fully fermented, it emits the sweet smell of sugar.
Flavor: The less-fermented tea owns a taste closer to natural plants. The more it is fermented

Fixation

After the fresh leaves wither to the appropriate degree, we stir them with high temperature to stop the fermentation, destroying the enzyme in the leaves. Stirring helps to rid the bad smell of fresh leaves, and the evaporation of water makes the fresh leaves easier to be rolled. To address shortly, fixation means killing the cell of tea leaves by high temperature and stopping its fermentation. There are two ways of fixation:

1.Stirring: The traditional way is to stir the fresh leaves with a huge pan, and the modern way involves a cylinder type water-removing machine.
2.Steaming: Steamed the fresh leaves with the vapour until they are cooked.

Rolling

During the rolling process, the fresh leaves after fixation are kneaded like dough. The fresh leaves now are already cooked, though having the surfaces dried, the inside are still wet. Therefore, as long as one kneads the leaves with appropriate strength, the fresh leaves would not break, but the juice would be squeezed out. We can’t dry all the tea juice but only squeeze them out to the surface, so if there are too much tea juice, one should lighten the pressure to let the juice be absorbed by the leaves again. Three advantages are brought by the Rolling process:

1.By kneading, the cells of leaves are broken, the ingredients will then be easier to dissolve into water while the making of tea.
2.Curl the tea leaves for easier storage. (If the rolling process is ignored, the tea leaves would be like dried leaves and break easily when one touches.)
3.One could control the flavor of tea by applying different degree of pressure when kneading.

Cloth Rolling

During Cloth Rolling process, a special cloth bag is used to complete the process. The kneaded leaves are put into the Greenness Fryer Machine to be fried. The fried leaves are then put into a specially-made cloth bag, each with 2.2~2.5 Kg of tea leaves. After the leaves are packed, we shake the bag to press the tea leaves together. After closing the bag by knotting, it was put to the tea-ball shaping machine for further rolling.

Each time the rolling is finished, the tea bags should be taken out and put into the Unravel Machine to unravel the tea leaves--now twisted into a ball-- in the bag. After some rearrangement of the leaves, they are put back in the machine for more rolling. These steps are repeated three times before the leaves are put to the Tea Fixation Machine for baking and drying. The juice that was squeezed out during rolling is now dried on the leaves.

The above procedures- from rolling into tea balls then unraveled- have to be repeated thirty times before the rolling process for Port Tea is completed.

Stir and hot air fixation

To equip the tea leaves with a mature flavor, we have to bake them with heat. By using the dryer, the hot breeze was released to dry the rolled leaves and evaporate more water once again. By doing so, the quality of tea leaves wouldn’t be interrupted nor changed during storage.

1.Lower the water content to assure the quality remains the same during storage. This process needs only the minimization of the water content, and is therefore a physical change.
2.Improve and adjust the color, fragrance, flavor and looks of tea. Fire is used to bring out the fragrance of tea, which is a chemical change. When mixing different kinds of tea leaves, the fire is especially important since only by roasting could the qualities of different teas be united. We can say that the fire brings out the soul of tea leaves.

During the storage and transporting, tea absorbs water in the air and thus the quality might be changed. To emit such possibility, one could carefully roast the tea leaves again to reduce the smell and bring out a heavier fragrance; the tea would also taste richer and the quality better.