How to process Tie Guan Yin tea?

processing chart of Tieguanyin

Tie Guan Yin tea (TGY) is the most complicated than other teas in processing. Even you have good TGY tea leaf and pluck it at the best time, if you don’t have skilled master, you’ll make a TGY priced low although it should deserve high price. And that’s why the country secret the processing method before.

So if you want get high quality TGY, only good tea tree is not enough, Yunxiang Tea Company (www.yunxiangtea.com) has excellent tea mountain where located in Inner Anxi, 1300m high, the mountain always surround by mists, that kind of circumstance is ideal for tea plantation.. Normally we’ll have 2 tea seasons, Spring and Autumn. Here is the art pictures I took yesterday:

1, plucking TGY tea leaves.(cai qing)

There you should pay attention to the picking time, picked between 8-10AM and 3-5PM will have weaker quality than picked in 11AM-2PM, enough sunshine will get tea better, but maybe you’ll arise a question “why cannot we pick all tea in 11AM-2PM?”, that’s a good question, when the tea grows into the right plucking time you got to pick it up, it can’t wait even just few hours or we’ll get more weak quality. That’s one of the reasons that why Chinese says “good tea need to be taken care of by God”.

picking tea

And do you know in a tea tree which leaf has the best quality? bud, first leaf, second leaf or third leaf? ^_^

2, sun-dried withering. (sai qing)

tea sun-dried

Most kinds of tea leaves have to be withered by sunshine, that’s so natural and special, even some scientists wither it with man-made sun instead, but still cannot get the same result as natural sun. Normally the afternoon sunshine will be the best choice. Please don’t make the leaves burned.

3, cooling. (liang qing)

cooling tea leaves

The leaves adsorb heat from sun, before proceed to next stept we must take leaves to another place without sunshine and lay them out to cool them down, or you’ll get the leaves into yellow.

4, tossing. (yao qing)

tossing tea leaves

Shaking the TGY leaves in a special bamboo container, that’s the most important step of whole. you must take care of how many circles you’ll toss the container. The point of tossing is to bruise the edge of leaves that make accelerate the oxidation. That’s the key step why TGY can have so unique and charming character.

we’ll repeat step 4 and step 5 for several times. and how many times it will need?

5, air-conditional withering. (wei diao)

withering tea leaves

Then we’ll put the leaves into air-conditional room, there you’ll got the special flavor. Even finished the processing and no tea in that room for months, you can still smell that out.

6, stop oxidation. (sha qing)

stop oxidation

In order to stop the oxidation and keep the character we’ll use special round pan, and we can clear up the gramineous too. at the same time, the leaves will have less moisture and get more soft that make it easier for curling.

7, curling. (rou nian)

Curling will need four little steps:

wrapping tea leaves

i.              first, wrapping (shu bao) that make the leaves into a ball;

tumbling tea leaves

ii.              second, tumbling (bao rou) that make the special round tight shape;

breaking up tea ball

iii.              third, (da san) that will break up the tea ball;

iv.              fourth, (wei hong) dry it if it’s too wet and make it soft again.

repeat first to fourth for several times until you get satisfactory shape.

8, drying. (hong gan)

drying tea leaves

the last step is drying TGY leaves to make it easier for storing.

Then we’ll sort it, grade it and pack it. That’s the whole steps of processing TGY, people cannot stop once you launch the first step, it will take about 20 hours a day to process tea. so it’s really a hard work. When we drink so excellent tea, please say thanks to them, to these cute farmers.