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Green tea, along with white tea, is the purest and least processed category of tea. The principle that guides the processing of its leaves is to preserve their freshness, to bring back to our cup the season that green tea represents: spring, with its new and delicate energy.
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We have already discussed on our blog the history of tea and the different spellings of the word tea, so we will focus on the history of green tea and how we transitioned from powdered tea to leaf tea. Black tea and oolong tea did not exist in ancient times: green tea was the most consumed starting from the Song dynasty (960-1279) but at that time it was not consumed as we do now. Its leaves were first powdered and then pressed into cakes. To be consumed, the Chinese would break off a piece of the cake, crush it into powder, and then whisk it as we do today with matcha tea. This habit changed during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) when Emperor Taizu prohibited the use and sale of these cakes introducing leaf tea, as we know it today. The Japanese did not like this innovation and for a long time preferred to continue consuming powdered tea, which is why in their traditional tea ceremony they consume Matcha.
But let's go back to the processing processes of green tea. We said that green tea is the lightest of all because the impact humans have on the plant is minimal. Nevertheless, we need to extract and taste the flavor. To do this, we must slightly break the thick walls of the leaf cells, otherwise the essence of the tea will remain trapped in the cells. The rolling of the leaves serves precisely this purpose, crushing the leaves, bringing essential oils to the surface, and facilitating the entry of oxygen.
The next phase after rolling green tea is oxidation. Oxidation, even minimal, is inevitable, if only because it begins when the leaves are detached from the mother plant. At this point, the water content is too high and prevents the leaves from being processed. There is no tea that is not, even slightly, oxidized. Even white tea is. What varies among the different types is the percentage of oxidation. Green teas have low oxidation, along with white teas.
Another very important process is that of whitering, which can be translated into Italian as withering. It is important that the loss of water from the leaves occurs slowly, but only the tea master knows how to carry it out, a lot depends on the weather. It is not the same to let them wither on a sunny day, or on a humid and cloudy day. In most cases, the tea is harvested and processed immediately, on the same day, which gives us the idea of a freshness frozen in the leaves, rich in Yang energy, ready to be released in the cup.
We will not go into the specifics of green tea processing because generalizing is quite useless.
Every green tea, every tea master, every terroir requires different techniques and nuances. With terroir, a French word borrowed from the world of wine, we mean the uniqueness of a place composed of its geology, geography, climate, and also cultural heritage. Terroir is the composition of the soil and climate of a particular region, but also the relationships that the local people have with the plants, how they understand and treat them.
Our passion for teas, especially for green teas, the many trips to the lands of tea and the experience gained in years of passionate work have allowed us to select among the hundreds of varieties available in our online tea shop, four new arrivals of great value that we invite you to try.
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