Spring green tea or Winter green tea?
Most tea drinkers blindly think spring tea is better than other harvest, but I have found out that there are different qualities in each harvest and different processing styles that bring out the best of each harvest.
Spring tea and seasons.
Sencha is a specific style of processing. Typically steamed at the initial processing stage and slowly rolled into dry leaf. This style processing benefit from young tender leaves and high level of amino acids because of brewing practices that follow the processing. It allows the leaf to bring out concentrated tea liquor and full range of flavor. Sweetness, astringency and bitterness in balance. Similarly each processing style is developed to express the best of desired tea type and their particular harvest.
If Winter harvest was used for sencha processing, undesired quality in sencha is quite obvious due to nature of sencha processing that expresses dynamic range of flavors and aroma.
Winter tea has its own unique quality and cannot be processed in the same way for the best winter harvest quality.
..., but why do they process it in the same way? No wonder winter tea in Japan received bad reputation about their quality because they use the same sencha processing style.
The most important part is its economy of tea processing. Since fall and winter tea generate little profit and a lot of people rather not harvest winter tea at all, but there are nearly extinct regional processing styles also unfortunately called bancha.
I looked at various other types of winter harvest that adapted completely different processing styles. In rural regions of Japan where winter tea was quite common until recently, there are handful of devoted grandpa and grandma still doing the traditional regional processing.
Winter Tea
I started experimenting with winter harvest a few years ago. There are a lot of regional recipes using fall and winter teas. They can be very wide range from green tea to black tea to post fermented tea. Even within green teas there are so much variations in how they processed. Mostly what was available to process tea at each household was the limiting factor. Iron wok, steamer, drying room, etc
Looking at regional green teas, I found that there are simple sun dried green tea tea, labor intensive pan-fired tea, half-finished tea and lots more. Perhaps I will talk about individual style in the future.
Spring tea and seasons.
Sencha is a specific style of processing. Typically steamed at the initial processing stage and slowly rolled into dry leaf. This style processing benefit from young tender leaves and high level of amino acids because of brewing practices that follow the processing. It allows the leaf to bring out concentrated tea liquor and full range of flavor. Sweetness, astringency and bitterness in balance. Similarly each processing style is developed to express the best of desired tea type and their particular harvest.
If Winter harvest was used for sencha processing, undesired quality in sencha is quite obvious due to nature of sencha processing that expresses dynamic range of flavors and aroma.
Winter tea has its own unique quality and cannot be processed in the same way for the best winter harvest quality.
..., but why do they process it in the same way? No wonder winter tea in Japan received bad reputation about their quality because they use the same sencha processing style.
The most important part is its economy of tea processing. Since fall and winter tea generate little profit and a lot of people rather not harvest winter tea at all, but there are nearly extinct regional processing styles also unfortunately called bancha.
I looked at various other types of winter harvest that adapted completely different processing styles. In rural regions of Japan where winter tea was quite common until recently, there are handful of devoted grandpa and grandma still doing the traditional regional processing.
Winter Tea
I started experimenting with winter harvest a few years ago. There are a lot of regional recipes using fall and winter teas. They can be very wide range from green tea to black tea to post fermented tea. Even within green teas there are so much variations in how they processed. Mostly what was available to process tea at each household was the limiting factor. Iron wok, steamer, drying room, etc
Looking at regional green teas, I found that there are simple sun dried green tea tea, labor intensive pan-fired tea, half-finished tea and lots more. Perhaps I will talk about individual style in the future.
Comments
Post a Comment