Tea expertise from plant to cup

Tea picking is still done in the traditional way, where tea leaves are handpicked and gathered into wide baskets by the tea pickers. Hand picking ensures that only the best leaves of the plant are collected and used for tea production. The best leaves are actually “two leaves and a bud”, with the leaf bud itself accompanied by two nearby young leaves.

Believe it or not, a picker plucks up to 25kg of green leaves a day, which is about 4-6kg of tea. The picked leaves are directly processed at the plantation to avoid the loss of aroma and quality.

For approximately 10 – 12 hours, the freshly picked leaves are spread over mats where warm air blows over them. This results in a 30% liquid loss of the tea leaf and preserves its smoothness.

This step is a game-changer. It defines whether black or green tea is produced.

• Green teas are steamed meaning shortly exposing them to high temperatures stops further fermentation. Thus, the tea leaves retain their delicate flavour and green colour.
• Black teas are fermented. As the leaves are ripped open, the substances in their cells react with oxygen. This is called “rolling” and is usually done by machines. Their colour changes to brown and the teas develop their characteristic black tea taste.

Drying is necessary to finalize the tea and assure its long storability. In black tea production, it’s the drying that finally stops the fermentation processes.

Nowadays, drying usually happens in large ovens. It’s quite a quick process, taking only 10 to 20 minutes.

At this stage, the tea is already “finalized” and can be enjoyed. Yet, tea plantations sort the raw teas into different qualities, also called (leaf) grades. The tea runs through different layers of sieves. As a result, you can differentiate between four main classifications: whole leaves, broken leaves, fannings and dust.

Very often, teas are already blended into bigger lot sizes at the tea gardens. This step requires a great deal of experience and is in many cases, based on secret recipes which can be hundreds of years old.

Blending means nothing – of course – if it doesn’t achieve the best possible taste. Assuring a premium tea quality is only possible by cup-tasting the teas over and over again.

And that explains why every single tea lot has to be inspected and tried by our Julius Meinl experts in the quality control before it can be purchased.