The sequence, in order
Six steps appear in different combinations and different orders, and no tea uses all of them. WITHERING removes moisture and makes the leaf pliable. BRUISING or ROLLING ruptures cells so their contents meet air. OXIDATION is what follows — the leaf’s own enzymes browning it over hours. FIXING applies heat to stop oxidation dead. SHAPING gives the leaf its final form, which decides how it extracts. DRYING takes moisture down to a storable level. A seventh, ROASTING, is applied to finished tea rather than fresh leaf, and an eighth, microbial FERMENTATION, belongs only to dark tea.
What each category actually does
GREEN TEA fixes early, before oxidation starts: pick, fix, shape, dry. BLACK TEA does the opposite, withering and rolling and then letting oxidation run to completion before drying. OOLONG bruises repeatedly so the leaf edges oxidise while the centre stays green, then fixes part way through — the maker chooses where. WHITE TEA does almost nothing: wither and dry, with no fixing and no rolling. YELLOW TEA is green tea with a smothering step added, where warm damp leaf is wrapped and left to change slowly. DARK TEA is the outlier, using microorganisms rather than enzymes, over months or decades.
The two forks that explain the most
If you learn only two things here, learn these. STEAMING VERSUS PAN-FIRING is how green tea is fixed, and it accounts for nearly everything separating Japanese green tea from Chinese: steam preserves a marine, vegetal character, a hot wok adds toasted chestnut. ORTHODOX VERSUS CTC is how black tea is shaped: twisting keeps the leaf intact so extraction is gradual and origin can be tasted, cutting shreds it into granules that give everything at once. Neither fork is a quality ladder. They are choices about what the tea is for.
Why the order matters as much as the steps
The same steps in a different order make a different tea. Fixing before rolling gives green tea; rolling before oxidising and then drying gives black. Sun-drying instead of machine drying is what lets pu-erh age at all, because it leaves enzyme and microbial activity intact where machine heat would finish the leaf. This is why TeaHQ stores processing as an ordered array rather than a set — the sequence is the information.