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What goes into making a great cup of tea?
Introduction
A lot goes into a great cup of tea. Numerous agricultural factors affect the quality of the resulting unprocessed tea leaves. Great care must also be taken while processing, packaging, and storing the final dried tea product to produce tea that tastes as wonderful as the particular tea crop allows. Finally, there are certain guidelines that should be followed by the tea drinker to prepare a perfect cup of tea.
Agricultural Factors: Great tea starts on the farm.
The vast majority of tea grown around the world is commercial grade tea, grown and processed in a way to maximize the yield per acre per hour of work for a given tea plantation. A smaller amount of tea is grown and processed with less focus on labor-intensiveness and on the pounds of tea produced per acre, and more emphasis on producing extremely high quality tea in order to sell the tea for a premium.
Commercial grade teas are grown from tea plants that are the most resistant to disease, pests, and changes in temperature, whereas the highest quality tea is produced by tea plantations that focus entirely on tea plants that may be much more finicky than commercial strains of the tea plant, but produce tea leaves of a significantly higher quality. The best tea comes from less plentiful youngest shoots of the tea plant. Additionally, the very best tea comes from the bud and the two adjacent tea leaves. Tea plantations that focus on producing extremely high quality tea use the remainder of the tea of a given tea plant for their lower grades.
Harvesting tea is time consuming, hard work. Oftentimes, the harder it is to pick the tea, the higher the quality of the resulting tea product. Much of the best tea in the world comes from mountainous regions, such as that grown in the Darjeeling region in Northern India. Tea pickers in the mountainous regions can pick only a fraction of the tea that other tea workers can pick, making the tea more expensive per pound to produce. Tea pickers of the highest quality tea also must make more trips back and forth between the fields and the tea processing shop, because the tea leaves at the bottom of overstuffed baskets get crushed beneath the weight of the other tea. Tea is more like soft fruit than grains in that tea leaves begin decomposing when the leaves have little cuts and dings.
In summary, the highest quality tea is produced by tea plantations that focus on remarkable quality, not production costs.
Processing factors involved in producing a great cup of tea.
Tea leaves are different than most other agricultural products, in that fresh tea leaves are ready for consumption. Tea leaves must be processed. A batch of fresh, green tea leaves can be made into green tea, black tea, or oolong tea, simply by changing the way that the leaves are processed. The single most important factor involved in processing high quality tea is whether the tea is rolled carefully by hand or whether a machine rolls up the tea in bulk.
Green tea is the most “raw” of all teas. The leaves are heated to kill active enzymes that would cause the tea leaves to ferment. The tea leaves are then repeatedly rolled and dried until the final tea product, with its own distinctive look and moisture content is produced.
Black tea is the most heavily processed kind of tea. First, a thin layer of tea leaves is placed on a screen and air is passed over the leaves in order to dry them. The half-dried tea is then carefully rolled by hand instead of by a machine to produce a higher quality product. Rolling the tea leaves tears them enough so that the tea leaves can be fermented in a slow, controlled way. The fermented tea is then dried and sifted to create a smaller amount of similarly sized pieces of rolled up black tea.
Oolong tea is the middle ground of tea, processed in a way similar to black tea, but fermented to a lesser degree.
Once the tea leaves are fully processed, they are often blended with other processed teas to produce a blended tea. As a final optional step, the tea blended or unblended tea product can be scented with oils, jasmine blossoms, or other natural ingredients.
In the end, it is tedious hand processing that produces tea with leaves that are less broken, which not only adds to the tea’s aesthetics, but in fact produce a better tasting tea. Machine-produced tea ends up being crushed up into little pieces, which is best for tea bags, both because machine-produced tea is less expensive and also because smaller pieces of tea have more surface area, resulting in a tea bag that can be steeped more quickly.
The Human Factor: A great cup of tea is made, not born.
Once you’ve bought premium tea from your local tea shop it is up to you to turn the high quality tea into the perfect cup. Great tea is easy to make, but even easier to mess up. You’ll need the right materials, and you will need to give your creation the time and attention it needs.
First things first: store your premium tea carefully in an airtight container away from other fragrant foods. Your expensive, delicate premium tea will end up tasting like your cheap herbal tea if the two are stored next to one another in non-airtight containers. Additionally, avoid see through and plastic containers, and do not refrigerate or freeze premium tea.
The first trick in making the tea is to start with high quality water and the right amount of tea. Extremely pure water can produce a less good cup of tea, but for the most part, bottled or filtered water is better than most tap water for the purpose. Additionally, really serious tea enthusiasts weigh their tea instead of measuring it out using a measuring spoon because it is the weight of the tea, not the volume, which determines the strength of a cup of tea.
Next, the water must be heated to the proper temperature. Great black tea is made from boiling water, whereas green tea is made from water that is a little cooler than boiling.
The final and most important rule to follow to make a perfect cup of tea is to avoid over-steeping the tea. Ideal tea steeping times range from two to seven minutes. Invest in a timer in order to do your premium teas justice.
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