Production routes

Full enzymatic oxidation of the rolled or cut leaf, halted only by firing once oxidation is complete.

• CTC black tea

  8 steps

  The orthodox route with one slot filled by a different machine, and every other decision in the route reorganised around what that machine needs.

• Flavoured black tea

  7 steps

  A finished black tea, blended to a house standard and then tumbled with a metered flavouring. It looks like scenting in the packet and it is a completely different operation.

• Jassid-bitten black tea (mi xiang hong cha)

  6 steps

  An orthodox black manufacture whose defining condition happens before the pluck: the leaf must have been fed on by the tea green leafhopper, which rules out spraying.

• Orthodox black tea

  8 steps

  Rupture first and let the reaction run. Heat arrives only at the very end, to stop something that has already been allowed to finish.

• Pine-smoked souchong

  7 steps

  An orthodox black tea route with a brief pan step inserted in the middle of it and pine smoke applied at both ends — the only black tea route that applies heat before the drier.

• Scented black tea

  8 steps

  A finished black tea returned to the factory in the flowering or fruiting season and put through the same layering loop that makes jasmine green — real blossom, screened out, re-dried.

Sealed yellowing (men huang) applied to the fixed leaf, between fixation and final drying.

• Coarse yellow tea with a high finishing fire

  6 steps

  The yellow tea that behaves like a dark tea. Coarse leaf and stem, yellowed in bulk rather than in a wrapper, and finished with a fire long and hot enough that the roast becomes the tea's main character.

• Yellow tea: the inserted smother

  6 steps

  A Chinese green tea route with exactly one operation inserted into it. Nothing is substituted and nothing is removed, and that one insertion is the whole category.

Kill-green (fixation) applied before meaningful oxidation can develop.

• Chinese pan-fired green tea

  6 steps

  Heat first, shape second. The route puts fixation at position three, before the leaf has been ruptured at all, and everything that follows happens to a leaf that has stopped changing colour.

• Hojicha

  6 steps

  The Japanese steamed green route, taken as far as refining, and then a final firing pushed so far past its usual point that it stops producing a green tea at all.

• Japanese pan-fired green tea

  6 steps

  A Chinese fixation at the head of a Japanese refining line. It is the only Japanese green tea route that does not steam, and the tail it keeps is what stops it being a Chinese route.

• Japanese steamed green tea

  8 steps

  Fixation by steam within hours of plucking, then a rolling sequence that dries and shapes at once — and then a second factory that turns one intake into four named teas.

• Jasmine-scented green tea

  8 steps

  A finished green tea re-enters the factory in the flowering season and goes round a loop — layer with fresh blossom, screen it out, re-dry — as many as nine times.

• Pearl-formed green tea (zhu cha)

  6 steps

  A Chinese pan-fired green in which the shaping and the drying are one operation: the leaf is worked against a heated pan until each piece closes into a hard pellet.

• Shaded, unrolled and milled (tencha to matcha)

  6 steps

  The route defined by an omission. Everything else in green tea rolls the leaf; this one deliberately does not, and the whole product depends on that refusal.

• Single-leaf charcoal-fired green tea (Liu An Gua Pian)

  6 steps

  The only Chinese green manufacture with no rolling in it at all: each leaf is separated from its bud and stem by hand, fired in two pans, and finished over a white-hot charcoal fire.

• Unrolled roasted bancha

  5 steps

  The hojicha route with the rolling taken out, and the omission is visible from across a room: the leaf never becomes leaf-shaped at all, and stays as whole flat brown blades that most people do not recognise as tea.

Post-fermentation: microbial wet-piling (shou) or extended natural ageing (sheng).

• Aerobic mould-fermented bancha

  5 steps

  Japan's other fermented tea, and the one that does the opposite of the pickled teas: it lets the air in. The leaf is heaped after fixation and a mould is allowed to grow through it in the open, with nothing sealed and nothing weighted.

• Anaerobic pickled tea

  5 steps

  The shortest dark tea route and the only one that excludes air. Air is what every other fermentation in tea depends on, and removing it changes which organisms do the work.

• Anhua basket-packed dark tea

  8 steps

  A pile-fermented Hunan dark tea packed into a woven basket rather than pressed in a mould, and then left outdoors for weeks in alternating sun and night dew. The container is a processing step.

• Boiled and rubbed lactic tea

  5 steps

  A pickled tea whose leaf is boiled in water rather than steamed above it, and then rubbed before it goes into the barrel. Both differences exist to produce something the other pickling routes do not have: a liquid to seal the leaf under.

• Border-trade brick tea

  9 steps

  The dark teas that were never made to be collected. Coarse leaf and whole stem, piled and turned for weeks, then pressed into a brick hard enough to travel a thousand miles on an animal and be broken up with a knife at the other end.

• Citrus-stuffed dark tea

  7 steps

  A finished shou pu-erh is packed into a hollowed mandarin and the fruit is dried around it. The container is not packaging: it is an ingredient that ages alongside the tea for as long as the object exists.

• Fu brick with fungal flowering

  10 steps

  The only route in tea where the defining transformation happens after the tea has been pressed, inside the brick, in a room built to encourage one particular fungus.

• Liu Bao

  8 steps

  A dark tea route in which the warehouse is part of the manufacture rather than what happens afterwards — the basket stage is scheduled, not incidental.

• Pounded and aged coin tea

  6 steps

  Steamed leaf beaten in a mortar until it is a paste, formed into discs with a hole through the middle, dried and then held while a slow microbial change works inward. It is the only route in the catalogue whose leaf never exists as separate leaves after the second step.

• Sheng pu-erh

  11 steps

  A green tea route with one substitution — sun-drying instead of oven-drying — and that substitution is why a cake can change for decades instead of going stale.

• Shou pu-erh

  13 steps

  The sheng route for five steps, and then a fork: the maocha is wetted, heaped and fermented by living organisms for weeks before anything is pressed.

Deliberate bruising to initiate edge oxidation, halted partway, frequently followed by roasting.

• Aged and re-fired oolong

  8 steps

  A finished oolong put into storage and then taken out every few years to be fired again. Ageing here is maintained rather than merely permitted, which is the opposite of how every other aged tea in the catalogue is made.

• Anaerobic-held oolong

  8 steps

  An ordinary oolong line with the air taken out of one slot. Where a maker would shake and rest the leaf through a night, this route seals it into a tank and displaces the oxygen.

• Leafhopper-bitten oolong

  10 steps

  The only route in the catalogue whose first step is not performed by anyone. An insect feeds on the standing crop for weeks, and the tea cannot be made without it.

• Light rolled oolong

  10 steps

  The longest route in tea by elapsed time, in which the leaf is bruised at its edges, rested, bruised again, and only fixed once the maker judges by smell that it is ready.

• Light strip oolong

  10 steps

  The missing corner of the oolong grid. Shape and finish have been a matched pair in every oolong route so far — pellet with a bake, strip with a roast — and this is the fourth combination: a loose twisted leaf that is never roasted.

• Pressed square oolong

  7 steps

  The only compressed oolong there is. A finished oolong manufacture, interrupted before drying so that the damp leaf can be pressed into a small paper-wrapped square and baked inside its wrapper.

• Roasted ball oolong

  11 steps

  Ball rolling and a charcoal roast in the same route, which the two Sprint 32 oolong records deliberately kept apart. It is the traditional half of a schism the Anxi trade has been arguing about for a generation.

• Roasted strip oolong

  12 steps

  The same oolong front end, then a tail nothing else has: dry, hand-pick the stalk, roast, rest for months, roast again — a manufacture measured in seasons.

• Scented oolong

  9 steps

  A complete roasted oolong manufacture, then a scenting loop in autumn when the osmanthus flowers — and, unusually, the blossom is normally left in.

Withering and drying only, with no fixation and no deliberate rolling.

• Pressed and aged white tea

  7 steps

  The withered-and-dried route with a pressing tail bolted on, borrowed wholesale from dark tea and applied to a leaf that was never fixed and never rolled.

• Scented white tea

  7 steps

  The jasmine loop applied to the most fragile base it is used on: a bud-only white tea, which limits how many rounds it can take.

• Withered and dried white tea

  6 steps

  The shortest route in tea, and the one with nowhere to hide. There is no fixation and no rolling, so the wither is not a preparation for the process — it very nearly is the process.