How tea is made
Tea Blending:
Approximately 90% of the tea drunk in Britain is known as the popular brand leading blends - the type of tea that you can buy in most supermarkets and shops. These are a blend of teas which contain up to 35 different teas and remain constant in quality, character and flavour, despite some teas being seasonal or in short supply due to adverse weather conditions in one or other of the growing regions. Each popular blend has its own recipe and that recipe is the company's trade secret. Some of the popular brand leading blends are blended to cope with the varying types of water in Britain be they soft or hard.
Tea Harvesting and Growing:
Tea harvesting is a laborious task that requires special training and is very much an art. similar to the process or growing grapes for wipe production.
The best climate conditions for growing tea are usually those that are higher in altitude and get plenty of rainfall. It also seems preferable to have cooler weather and misty mornings to shield the sun which causes the bush to mature more slowly.
Tea harvesting is referred to a plucking, when plucking the leaves for a high quality tea, they pluck the bud and second and third leaf only. If more leaves are taken with the bud this will produce a lower quality tea and if referred to as course plucking.
Typically a tea bush will produce approximately three thousand tea leaves a year, or about one pound after processed.
Once the tea leaves are collected in baskets they are taken to the factory to be processed. The processing steps taken will depend on the type of tea desired.
Tea Processing:
Processing tea is generally considered the art of tea making, no dissimilar from vintners testing grapes for wine production. It is where many of the subtleties in taste, body, and overall character of the tea are created.
In its most basic form, it is taking the raw green leaves and deciding whether or not, and how much oxidation (or fermentation) should take place before drying them out. Tea leaves have enzymes in their veins.
When the leaf is broken, bruised, or crushed, the enzymes are exposed to oxygen resulting in oxidation. The amount of oxidation depends upon how much of the enzymes are exposed and for how long. Each types of tea has a different processing technique which is used. Click below to find the different procedures to make different types of tea:
White Tea Processing Techniques
Green Tea Processing Techniques
Oolong Tea Processing Techniques
Black Tea Processing Techniques
Tea blending:
Most tea drunk in western country are blends of several teas together, these are name brand tea bought in supermarkets and shops. These teas may contain as many as thirty five different teas and remain a constant quality, flavor and quality, despite different growing seasons, or shortages of a particular type of tea. Each popular blend has its how recipe and this recipe is the company’s closely guarded trade secret.
It is the job of the tea blender, a tea taster of many years of experience, to ensure that his companies blend meets the companies criteria. This ensures that each cup of tea of a particular blend is as similar as possible. To accomplish all tea bought at auction will be tasted when arriving at the packaging factory. This is to ensure that tea has not been damage or contaminated since it was tasted and purchased by the tea buyers from the tea auction.
During the course of a day, a Taster can sample between 200-1000 teas, adjusting his recipe to ensure that the company's brand remains constant. The blender's findings are fed into a computer and the requisite numbers of sacks and chests of the different teas are taken from the company storeroom, opened and conveyed into a large blending drum. This rotates, mixing all the teas together. When the blending is complete, the blend is ready for packaging into packets or tea bags.
Packaging:
For loose-leaf packets, the blended tea is put into a hopper which feeds a machine that carefully measures and dispenses the right amount of tea into the packet, filling it and sealing it, and weighing it as a final check. This is all done automatically in seconds.
Tea bag tea is fed into specially designed machines which will fill thousands of teabags, be they round, square or pyramid shaped, each minute. Each bag usually contains at least 2.27gms of tea and is hermetically sealed, then packed into cartons.
Specialty teas, that is a blend of teas which take their name from a growing area, time of day or person's name, are blended in just the same way, but there are not so many teas in any one blend of specialty tea as there are in a popular blend.
Trading Tea:
Tea is purchased in many ways. Tea may be sold at auction in the countries where it was grown. There are international tea auction centers in Kenya, Sri Lanka, Malawi and India, Indonesia and China. The price of the tea is governed by quality, supply and demand, like most products and goods. Tea brokers are used as intermediaries and taste, value and bid on tea in behalf of their clients. Tea may also be sold from the tea garden by private sale or at offshore auction while on route to its final destination.
About Tea | History of Tea | How Tea is Made | Where tea is Produced
Tea Customs