Fungal flowering (jin hua)

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.

• Dark tea and pu-erh — Post-fermentation: microbial wet-piling (shou) or extended natural ageing (sheng).

What it is

Fu Zhuan brick tea is the only well-known tea in which a specific fungus is deliberately and visibly cultivated. After pressing, bricks are held under controlled temperature and humidity until Eurotium cristatum colonises them and appears as distinct golden specks throughout the brick. This is a different operation from the wet-piling that makes shou pu-erh, which relies on a mixed and largely uncontrolled microbial population; here one organism is the point, and its visible presence is the grading criterion.

Also transliterated as: jin hua, jinhua.

What it does to the leaf

Establishes a controlled Eurotium cristatum colonisation throughout a pressed brick under managed heat and humidity.

What it does to the cup

Softens the tea’s coarseness and produces a distinctive sweet, faintly mushroom-like and grain-like character.

Variants that matter

Ways this step is carried out that produce genuinely different results, rather than regional names for the same thing.

Traditional Jingyang pressing

Historically the flowering was held to succeed only in Jingyang, Shaanxi. Production has since moved to Anhua with controlled chambers.

Other steps at the Fermentation stage

• Anaerobic pickling — Packing steamed leaf into a sealed vessel and excluding air, so lactic acid bacteria rather than moulds carry out the fermentation.
• Liu Bao pile fermentation — Wuzhou’s own microbial piling process for Liu Bao, which shares a family with pu-erh wet-piling and is not the same operation.
• Turning the pile (fan dui) — The scheduled turns that redistribute a fermenting heap, which is how a pile is steered — the temperature at its core is the whole control system.
• Wet piling (wo dui) — Deliberate microbial fermentation of finished leaf under heat and humidity — what makes shou pu-erh.
• Wetting the pile (chao shui) — The measured addition of water to dry maocha that starts a wet-piling fermentation, and the single decision that most determines what the finished shou tastes like.

Teas that go through this step

• Fu Zhuan
• Hand-pressed Fu Zhuan

Guides covering this step

• What post-fermentation actually is, and why dark tea is the real exception — Five of the six tea categories are finished when they leave the factory. Dark tea is not: it is the one family in which living organisms are part of the manufacturing process, and that single difference explains almost everything unusual about it.
• What oxidation does chemically, and why “fermentation” is the wrong word for it — Oxidation is an enzyme-driven chemical reaction involving no living organisms. Fermentation involves microbes. Tea writing uses the words interchangeably, which makes half the category descriptions incoherent — and there is one genuine exception where the microbial word is correct.
• Teas made from finished tea — Jasmine tea, hojicha, shou pu-erh and the Fu brick all begin with a completed, saleable tea and then do something else to it. That is where the six-category scheme starts to creak, and the creaking is informative.