Labor Day｜A cup of tea to all the ingenious workers in the tea industry

May is coming, the first day of summer

The spring tea season has been immersed in the fragrant and tender tea soup with green buds, and it is the first day of May. This laborer is an exclusive festival for the holidays. When we hold a cup of fragrant tea in our hands, letting go and enjoying ourselves in the landscape or in the teahouse, tea farmers and tea makers seem to be completely "insulated" during the holiday because "tea doesn't wait for me"! What's more, they have an ingenuity in their hearts that is poured out with sweat.

Tea farmers: Picking and selling green tea is the real business

Take green tea as an example. 1 gram of green tea is equal to 112 bud heads. If you pick one bud head at a time, 1 kilogram of green tea requires 56,000 buds. A bud head. If you drink 3 grams of tea, you need the hands of the tea maker to pick it on the branches 336 times.

Picking tea is a hard and delicate job, and it is not as beautiful and poetic as we imagined. Tea-picking people get up early and go late at night, carrying tea baskets and climbing over the mountains to pick tea. They walked together on the dewdrops, carrying tea baskets on their waists, and spread among the green tea mountains. In order to gain more time for tea picking, we will bring simple dry food for lunch.

Tea pickers are not allowed to wear fingernails, because tea picking requires lifting. You cannot pinch it with your nails, let alone cut it with scissors. You need to gently twist the tea buds and pull them up. Do not use hand cream as anything on your hands will contaminate the tea.

Real tea pickers do not sing cheerful tea picking songs or pose for pictures. Some are just hands covered with calluses, chapped skin, and busy and nervous. They race against time to retain the aroma of the bud tips.

Tea maker: work overtime to make the best tea

Tea greens cannot wait, labor is the most glorious

The fresh leaves after picking need to be spread out for a period of time , causing part of the water to evaporate and soften the leaves, which facilitates subsequent processing. During this process, the aroma substances complete a certain transformation, and a series of enzymatic reactions are performed at the same time, so that the flavor substances of the tea soup are also decomposed and transformed.

It takes about two hours to spread out. The next step is the very critical greening step. To use a scientific explanation, greening is to passivate the enzymes in the tea leaves at high temperatures. Only through this process can green tea be made. Only then can the quality of the final clear soup and green leaves be formed; in layman's terms, making green tea is to fry the tea, put the tea leaves into the hot pot and keep turning them with your hands. The perfect green leaves should be uniformly green in color, moderately dehydrated and slightly prickly to the touch, without being scorched or reddened. The fresh leaves after curing cannot be rolled directly. It takes about half an hour to rehydrate the tea leaves to redistribute the moisture inside the tea leaves evenly.

Roasting is also a time-consuming and laborious process. Crushing is not just about crushing the leaves. What is important is to rupture some cells of the tea leaves while rolling the tea leaves tightly into strips. Therefore, the rotation method is very important, and the rolling time depends on the time. It varies from person to person, usually at least 30 minutes.

After rolling, it is time to carry out the final shaping and drying stage. For many famous green teas with special shapes, shaping and drying are carried out at the same time. Shaping is the process of rearranging the shape of tea. The shaping techniques of different teas vary greatly. For example, the technique of making needle-shaped tea is a combination of striping and rolling.

Finally, when the tea leaves are dry enough to be twisted into powder, they are dry enough to be taken out of the pot and allowed to cool before being brewed.

The greatest joy of making tea is that tea makers can carefully control every link and watch the transformation process of tea leaves from fresh leaves to dry tea. However, they can never predict the changes before making the soup. the taste.

The best taste in the world is pure joy

Every piece of tea is precious

Picking tea is hard, making tea is even harder

A cup of tea records the hard work of the tea maker

Labor Day, this cup of tea

Respect the tea maker, respect the craftsmanship