Fresh-leaf transport and holding
The hours between the bush and the factory door, during which a packed bag of leaf can heat itself and start changing before anybody has decided what it should become.
What it is
Plucked leaf is alive, wet and respiring, and a sack of it generates heat. Packed tight in a nylon bag on a hot afternoon, the middle of the load climbs in temperature, the leaf at the bottom is crushed under the weight above it, and both of those start an uncontrolled oxidation that no later step reverses. The counter-measures are unglamorous and they are real work: loose-woven or ventilated baskets rather than sealed sacks, shallow fill depths, shade at the collection point, short and frequent runs to the factory rather than one full lorry at the end of the day, and in Japan refrigerated or forced-air holding at the receiving bay. Where a garden is far from its factory — the ordinary case in Assam, in much of Africa and across the Yunnan mountains — the transport decision constrains what can be made from the intake at all, because a leaf that has already reddened at the stem cannot be turned into a delicate green tea.
Also transliterated as: xian ye yun shu, xianye yunshu.
What it does to the leaf
Moves living, respiring leaf from field to factory while limiting compression, self-heating and premature cell rupture, all of which begin uncontrolled change before any processing decision is taken.
What it does to the cup
Leaf that has heated or bruised in transit carries a dull, slightly sour or stewed note through the whole process; it is associated with red-stemmed patches in a wet leaf and with a flat, muddled cup that the factory is usually blamed for.
Variants that matter
Ways this step is carried out that produce genuinely different results, rather than regional names for the same thing.
- Ventilated basket collection
- Open bamboo or plastic baskets carried loose rather than sacks. Halves the load per trip and is the standard wherever fine green tea is made.
- Cool-chain intake
- Chilled or forced-air holding at the factory bay, standard in Japanese cooperative facilities where the whole district delivers within the same two hours.
- Long-haul consolidation
- Leaf collected from scattered smallholdings and consolidated at a buying centre. The hardest case, and the reason smallholder leaf is often routed to CTC where a hard wither follows anyway.
Where this gets misdescribed
Processing is written about as though it begins when the leaf arrives. A great deal of what is later diagnosed as a withering fault or a fixation fault happened in a sack on a truck, and the factory received material that had already been partly processed by accident.
Other steps at the Plucking stage
- Fresh-leaf reception and grading — The decision, taken at the factory door, about which intake becomes which product — and the point at which a day's leaf is split into separate lots that never meet again.
- Hand plucking — Picking each shoot individually by hand, which is the only method that can choose what to take and what to leave.
- Leaf separation by hand (ban pian) — Breaking each freshly picked shoot apart by hand so that the individual leaves go forward and the bud and the stem are set aside.
- Mechanical harvesting — Cutting the top of the plucking table with a powered blade, which takes everything at a set height regardless of what is ready.
- Plucking standard — The rule about how much of each shoot is taken — bud only, bud and one leaf, bud and two, or mature leaf — which is set before any factory decision is made.
- Shading — Covering the bushes for days or weeks before plucking, which changes the leaf’s composition before it is ever picked.
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.