It's All About Tea — tea processing

In China, fermentation is a vital part of the food culture. Sauces and condiments, tofu, pickles, wine, and even nuts. You will find at least one fermented ingredient on every dinner table in China. It is no wonder that fermentation made its way into China's extensive and well-developed tea culture. (Read more)

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)

Chinese black tea – Hong Cha (红茶) – is one of the world's most widely produced teas, but it has a different name, a different history, and a fundamentally different character from the black teas most Westerners know. For centuries, Chinese farmers produced hong cha almost exclusively for export. It wasn't until 2005, when Jin Jun Mei sparked a domestic tea renaissance, that Chinese black tea became a tea for Chinese people, too. This is a guide to its history, its types, and what makes it worth drinking.  (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 other oolongs is the roasting process it undergoes. 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 a green tea. Only at the end of the processing will it gain its characteristic taste that we all love. (Read more)