Tea Processing
Crop
To achieve best results when cultivating tea, tropical and subtropical climate and fertile soil are crucial. It is planted on mountain slopes, as it is known that height has a lot to do with the quality of the final product.
The cultivation starts with planting of cuttings in a nursery garden where they grow during 6 months until reaching a height of 15 to 20 cm.
China and India are leaders in cultivating tea; together they own around half of the worlds’ production.
Recolección
Harvest
The crops can be harvested for the first time when they are four years old. Normally the process of picking the leaves is manual; this is what makes the harvest extremely laborious. There are three techniques of tea harvesting: standard (two leaves and a bud), medium (three leaves and a bud), and rough (four leaves and a bud on a stalk).
In Asia, as the tradition has it, it’s women who carry out this task due to their special manual skills. A professional female picker can collect between 20 and 25 kilos of fresh leaves that later become 4 or 5 kilos of black tea.
Elaboration
The leaves, after having been harvested, are subjected to processing. Production process of black tea differs from region to region, however it always consists of four basic steps: withering, rolling, fermenting and drying.
During the fermentation process the leaf juice is exposed to oxygen, which makes the colour change from green to black. 250 grams of green leaves become around 100 milligrams of fresh tea. Production of green tea, on the other hand, does not involve the fermentation phase; after the withering phase the leaves are subjected to steam treatment.
