Today, I want to discuss the harvesting methods used for tea and how these methods can significantly impact the quality of the final product. Basically, there are two main methods, and it boils down to a classic struggle: machines versus humans. But beyond resisting the onslaught of automation and keeping things traditional, does hand-harvesting really make a difference? Let's get into it.
Hand Harvesting: The Pros and Cons
I have mentioned previously how the Spring harvest is generally considered the premium harvest for Japanese teas. This is because the plant goes dormant over the Winter and stores up the nutrients it needs to survive during that time. Then, in Spring, all of these nutrients get put into the fresh, new growth. It is almost always exclusively the new growth that is harvested when making premium teas, as this is where the tea plant is most flavorful and the least bitter.
The most traditional picking, then, is the first bud and two leaves of the new growth of Spring. Indeed, when you see pictures of tea fields, though they may look very abundant, the vast majority of the leaves you see do not get harvested, but are simply left there to provide energy to the plant.
Picking only the first bud and two leaves is delicate work that requires precision. This is where hand-harvesting comes in. It is difficult to improve upon the precision that is possible with opposable thumbs. That said, this is also by far the slowest method of harvesting.
Machine Harvesting: Pros and Cons
The main benefit of machine harvesting is its efficiency. When a machine can do in a few hours what dozens of humans can do over a whole day, tea growers definitely save quite a bit of time and money. However, machines lack precision. They are generally just rows of rotating blades that are slung low across the rows of tea bushes. Inevitably, quite a bit more than just the top bud and two leaves gets harvested in this scenario.
What's more, the leaves that get harvested by machine are often cut and torn up, rather than delicately plucked at the base of the stem. This essentially speeds up oxidative processes and degradation of the tea, which is the opposite of what most green tea producers are going for.
It is not that machine harvested tea is all inherently bad. It may, however, require a bit more careful sorting after the fact to ensure it is of high quality and that no particularly offensive leaves find their way into the finished product.
Lastly, the machines can typically only be used on relatively flat fields. If a tea field is built into a slope - as many of the most prized tea fields are - they simply become too unwieldy to use.
It is true that technology continues to develop, and new mechanized plucking machines are starting to appear. However, these don't yet appear to be used on anything resembling a wide-scale.
A further benefit to taking it slow...
Although hand-harvesting may take days rather than hours, this very slowness may be an advantage when it comes to tea quality. There is an interesting sub-variety of Sencha (sun-grown Japanese green tea) that is referred to as "Kaoricha," or "Fragrant Tea." Kaoricha is essentially a regular Sencha that has been left out to wither for a day before fixing the leaves and halting oxidation. Withering is a process typically reserved for black teas, as with black teas there is inherently no rush to stop the process of oxidation. As a result, the Sencha oxidizes just a little bit (admittedly, if we see this as a good thing, it somewhat contradicts the point made above that cutting into the leaf and causing mild oxidation is inherently bad).
When you purchase Kaoricha, it is still distinctly green, but you can find little specks of purplish brown along the edges. The reason this is done is because the withering seems to bring out more floral notes from the tea, hence the name "Fragrant Tea." What strikes me as particularly interesting about this process is that back in the day, this would have been closer to the norm. There weren't motorized vehicles and conveyor belts to minimize the time the picked leaves spent out before being heat-treated. The tea leaves would have been forced to sit out to a greater degree than they do in most farms these days. So, my conjecture is that hand-picking has an added benefit of enabling tea leaves to go through this withering process, at least to some degree, which could quite possibly make hand-picked teas more fragrant.
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Anyways, you may remember that I've written in the past how hilly the areas we get our teas from are. As a result, most of our farmers are (not so tragically) forced to do things the old fashioned way and hand-harvest! Truthfully, even if they had the option to mechanize the process, I doubt they would, given their philosophy of tea-growing in general.
Thanks for reading and happy sipping,
Simon