It's All About Tea — tea processing

Tea brews can have so many beautiful color schemes: oak brown, amber orange, jade green, honey yellow… and the list goes on. 

As we’ve already learned, the color of the tea doesn’t always correspond with the tea category. In the west, we are mostly used to ordering a black tea and receiving a dark brown, almost black tea brew. When it comes to Chinese black teas (red teas), the color of the brew can vary from a darkish umber brown to a light golden liquid. 

So what are some of the things that influence the resulting color of the tea brew? (Read more)

Up until the mid 17th century (Late Ming, Early Qing Dynasty), the only teas widely consumed in China were green (unoxidized) and oolong (semi-oxidized) teas.

Nowadays, red tea is one of the most popular and widely produced teas in the world. However, it wasn't always this way.  (Read more)

Dating back to the Tang Dynasty, white tea wasn’t so much as a commodity as it was a tribute. Only the royal court could afford to drink such a delicate drink, and the tradition of this tea being highly prized stuck around for centuries to follow. Nowadays, white tea has gained its way into the cupboards of many of us and is no longer hard to acquire. However, there are still things influencing its high prices to this day. (Read more)

One of the things that makes Wuyi Rock Tea different from all other oolongs is the roasting process that it goes through. This process is not only one step but a few distinguished steps.

When yancha is only in the first stages of processing, it's still quite vegetal and floral, much like green tea. Only at the end of the processing will it gain its characteristic taste that we all love. (Read more)

Have you ever wondered what time of year your favorite teas are harvested?
Since tea bushes aren’t grown in greenhouses but are naturally grown in tea farms outside or sometimes even wildly, timing the harvest is of utter importance. With certain teas a crop can only be limited to a few days out of the whole year — if missed, the farmers would have to wait for the next season to produce this type of tea. (Read more)