Refining (shiage)
The second factory. Japanese green tea leaves the producer as aracha, an unfinished trade good, and is cut, sorted and separated elsewhere into the several named teas one intake contains.
The categories this step defines
In tea, processing is not a modifier applied to a category — it is what creates the category. These are the types that exist because this step exists.
- Green tea — Kill-green (fixation) applied before meaningful oxidation can develop.
What it is
Japanese tea manufacture is split between two businesses and the split is invisible on the packet. The grower's factory produces aracha — crude tea, correctly steamed, rolled and dried, but containing long unbroken leaf, stem, leaf hair and fine particles all together, and still carrying too much moisture to keep. A refiner then buys it and runs an operation that has no equivalent in Chinese manufacture: the long leaf is cut to a uniform length, the mass is passed over screens and through a winnower, and an electrostatic or mechanical separator pulls the stem out. What comes off that line is not one tea with waste removed. It is sencha from the leaf fraction, kukicha from the stem, mecha from the small rolled buds and konacha from the fines, and all four are sold as teas in their own right. The same separation is what produces karigane from a gyokuro intake and tencha's leaf-only fraction for milling.
Also transliterated as: shiage, shiage-cha, aracha.
What it does to the leaf
Cuts, screens, winnows and de-stems dried crude tea, separating one intake into several distinct commercial products rather than grading a single one.
What it does to the cup
Each fraction brews differently because each is a different part of the plant: the stem fraction is sweeter and lower in astringency, the fines are fast and strong, the leaf fraction is the balanced one the category is named for.
Variants that matter
Ways this step is carried out that produce genuinely different results, rather than regional names for the same thing.
- Cutting to length
- Long aracha leaf is cut so the finished tea packs and brews uniformly. It is why sencha leaf looks so consistent and why aracha sold unrefined looks nothing like it.
- Electrostatic stem separation
- Stem and leaf take different charges and separate on a charged roller. The machine that makes kukicha a product rather than a by-product.
- Aracha sold direct
- A small speciality trade sells unrefined aracha, stem and fines included. Rougher, more variable, and closer to what the grower actually made.
Where this gets misdescribed
Kukicha, konacha and mecha are widely described as low grades or as waste, which mistakes a separation for a hierarchy. They are different parts of the same intake, priced differently because demand for them differs, and konacha is not the dust left over from sencha — it is the fine fraction of the identical leaf, which is why the sushi-counter cup is strong rather than poor.
Other steps at the Rolling and shaping stage
- Blending to a standard — Combining lots so that a named tea tastes the same in March and in October, which is a manufacturing step performed on finished tea and not a compromise applied to it afterwards.
- Cloth-ball rolling — Wrapping leaf tightly in cloth and repeatedly kneading and unwrapping it until it forms tight spheres.
- CTC (crush, tear, curl) — Leaf passed through counter-rotating toothed rollers that cut it into small uniform granules.
- Curling and down-raising (cuo tuan xian hao) — Rubbing warm leaf between the palms into loose balls and breaking them apart repeatedly, which curls the leaf into spirals and lifts its down to the surface.
- De-stemming and de-veining — Separating stem and leaf vein from the leaf blade after drying, usually by air separation.
- Flat shaping — Pressing leaf flat against the side of a heated wok by hand during pan-firing.
- Needle shaping (li tiao) — Shaking fixed leaf along heated parallel grooves until each piece straightens into a needle, rather than twisting it into a curl.
- Orthodox processing — The older manufacturing route, in which leaf is twisted and rolled rather than cut, so it survives largely intact.
- Pearl forming (chao gan cheng yuan) — Working rolled leaf against the wall of a heated pan through successive pans until each piece closes into a hard sphere, drying and shaping in the same operation.
- Repeat rolling and roll-breaking (fu rou) — Rolling is done in two or three passes with the compacted lumps broken up and sifted between them, because one long pass tightens the outside of a ball of leaf and never reaches the middle.
- Rolling and shaping — Working the leaf to rupture its cells and give it a form that governs how it later brews.
- Rotorvane maceration — A screw press with internal vanes that macerates withered leaf continuously, sitting between orthodox rolling and CTC rather than belonging to either.
- Sorting and grading — Separating dried tea by particle size, density and colour into the grades it is sold as — a sorting operation, not a quality judgement.
- Stalk picking (jian ti) — Hand removal of stalk and yellow leaf from finished oolong, done between roasts rather than at the end — which is why it is an ordering fact and not a tidying-up one.
- Stone milling — Grinding de-stemmed tencha into powder between slow-turning granite wheels.
- Strip rolling — Rolling leaf into long twisted strips rather than compressing it into balls.
Teas that go through this step
Guides covering this step
- How one cultivar becomes three different teas — Several plants in commercial use are routinely made into a green tea, a black tea and an oolong, sometimes in the same district and sometimes by the same producer. What changes is the route, and what the plant contributes is a tilt rather than a category.
- What happens after the drier — In several traditions a tea is not finished when it comes out of the drying machine. Sorting, refining, final firing, blending and resting are real operations, they are frequently performed by a different business, and they can move a tea further than anything the grower did.
Sources
- TeaHQ editorial synthesis — TeaHQ
This page is TeaHQ’s own synthesis of well-attested production practice. No external technical document stands behind it, so it describes what producers do rather than asserting measured process parameters.