It is once said that if you know who I was, you would understand who I am. The tea sitting in front of you is full of life. Wishing to know her story, I took train three years ago to Wu Yi mountain to learn how to make tea.
Tea master says making tea is making water. When the water is gone, tea is ready. Making Oolong tea is a complicated process which involves different steps. This is how we make our teas.
凋零Withering – The best way to wither tea leaves is to leave tea leaves on a big bamboo sieve and then dry them under sun. According to the strength of sunshine, tea leaves take different length of time to wither.
However, natural sun withering needs perfect combination of sunshine, temperature, etc. When the season passes, or when it is rainy all the time, we use withering slot which is specially designed to help tea leaves wither indoor.
并筛’merge sieves’ – when tea leaves are withered enough, we put 2 or 3 portions of tea leaves together. Then let these mixed tea leaves to wither more till they are dry completely.
Why we mix these tea leaves together? This is because putting more tea leaves together can help increase temperature of tea leaves. This slightly increased temperature is perfect for tea leaves to ferment properly. Also, when mixing tea leaves, we can efficiently avoid tea leaves get stuck on bottom of bamboo sieve. Moving tea leaves quickly in bamboo sieve can also help tea leaves which are still drying get a beautiful natural curly shape.
Thickness of tea leaves decides how long we need to leave them on bamboo sieves for further withering.
摇青’ shake green’ – after the second step, we need to ‘shake’ tea leaves quite a lot with bamboo sieves. This is a very long process which requires a lot of energy and strength. Besides shaking tea leaves in bamboo sieves, we also developed such nice ‘bamboo machine’ to help further shake tea leaves. When the tea leaves get reddish edge while the tea leaves are still green inside, this process is finished. At this moment, tea leaves are described as ‘three red seven green’ (三红七绿). This is how tea leaves look like at the stage. The purpose of this is to help break tea leaves’ cell wall to help it better ferment later.
When ‘shake tea’ is completed, tea leaves are ready to ferment.
杀青’kill green’ – use hands to ‘wok’ tea leaves to stop it from fermenting naturally. However, when teas are ‘fired’ enough we need to take out tea leaves from wok and put them on bamboo sieve. Then use hands to massage tea leaves till they become long strings. This further helps to break tea leaves’ cell wall and, as a result of this, helps tea leaves ferment better.
The traditional way is double wok and double massage. The first time wok is called ‘wok the tea leaves’; the seoncd time ‘wok’ is always referred to as ‘wok (them) till ripe’. This process helps remove ‘dry taste’ of tea leaves. Also, after this stage, we need to hand pick imperfect tea leaves and get the perfect tea leaves ready for next step – bake.
焙火 ‘bake fire’- there are 2 famous ways to bake tea leaves and normally it takes 2 to 3 months time. The best season to bake tea is in summer. This is also why people always say making tea is a hard meditation through which you get a chance to communicate with yourself. After you finish this meditation, you get a purer soul.
At our tea workshop, we use both ways to bake tea leaves. The fire bake helps tea leaves to get completely dry and help form its special aroma of Oolong tea. These photos show you how we bake tea leaves.
Or sometimes we use water to bake tea leaves. This helps to make tea leaves 50 yo 60% dry. Like this photo shows,
Making Oolong tea leaves by hand is a very exhausting process.
