Tea Processing

Tea professionals often spend years understanding a single style of tea production so we certainly won’t try to cover all nuances and varieties of tea on this page!

Mastery of the processes involved in tea cultivation and preparation is the deciding factor in a tea's taste. First, oxidation must take place following harvesting; a reason, why most plantations have their own processing plants on-site to process the leaves as soon as they arrive from the field.

Tea production falls into one of two styles: orthodox or non-orthodox (the latter usually being the CTC, or “Crush-Tear-Curl” method). All tea production involves five basic processing steps which are adjusted depending on the tea variety.

1. Plucking

The leaves are harvested by hand, usually ranging between just the unopened bud to the top three leaves and the bud, depending on the tea being created. In order to make hand plucking possible, the tea "trees" are pruned into waist-high bushes. After plucking, the leaves are sorted for uniformity and any stems, twigs, broken leaves, etc. are removed.

2. Withering

The leaves are laid out to wilt and wither for several hours to prepare them for further processing. Tea leaves, even fresh tender ones, aren't very pliable. Without withering, they would shatter and crumble when rolled and shaped. During withering, the leaves are very gently fluffed, rotated and monitored to ensure even exposure to the air.

3. Rolling

This is where thousands of varieties in tea appearance are created, and also where the process of developing flavor is started. The softened tea leaves are rolled, pressed or twisted to break the cell walls of the leaf, wringing out the juices inside. This exposes enzymes and essential oils in the leaf to oxygen in the air - the start of oxidation.