Leafhopper-bitten oolong
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.
What makes this route what it is
A step upstream of the pluck, performed by an organism, that determines the product more completely than anything the maker does afterwards. It is the strongest case in the catalogue for the claim that a processing route is a sequence of events rather than a list of factory operations, and it is the only route where the maker's first real decision is when to stop waiting.
The route, in order
Each note describes what the step is doing in this route. The same operation does a different job in a different chain.
Weeks of feeding on the living shoot, in an unsprayed field, at whatever intensity the season provides. The maker's only control here is not to interfere, which is a real decision with a real cost and no way to correct it later.
Hand picking of bitten shoots specifically, leaving unbitten ones on the bush or separating them afterwards. The plucking standard is unusually fine for an oolong — bud and one or two small leaves — because a bitten shoot never grows to a normal size.
A short sun wither, on leaf that is already partly dehydrated from the feeding damage. This is the first place the route's material difference shows in the handling: the leaf gives up water faster and less predictably than an unbitten pluck.
The indoor rest. Longer than in the rolled routes, and the leaf is handled gently — small, damaged shoots break rather than bruise if they are worked like ordinary oolong leaf.
Light shaking, and much less of it than any other oolong route uses. The insect has already done a good deal of what the drum would be for, and a maker who shakes this leaf as hard as a Tieguanyin destroys it.
Still periods between the shakes, in which the honey and ripe-fruit register comes forward. The maker is judging when the wound-derived aroma and the oxidation aroma have met, which is a target no other route has.
Taken as far as any oolong in the catalogue and further than most, which is why the finished leaf is white, red, brown and green at once and why the tea is so often mistaken for a black tea in the cup.
Fixation at the deepest point of any oolong route here. Everything the field and the night produced is held at this moment.
A light twist, often after a covered damp rest that lets the fixed leaf soften enough to take a shape without shattering. The leaf is never compacted into a pellet — the character is fragile and a long rolling cycle would flatten it.
- 10.
Drying
A gentle finish, and the route ends here. There is no roasting stage at all, which in a tea this heavily oxidised is a deliberate and slightly counter-intuitive omission.
How it differs from its neighbours
A route described on its own teaches very little. The useful fact is always which other route it is nearly identical to, and where it leaves it.
This route inserts an operation the other does not have. Nothing is substituted and nothing is removed.
One operation inserted before everything else, and the only one in the catalogue that no person performs. Nothing is substituted and nothing is removed from the oolong manufacture that follows; the leaf entering it is simply not the same leaf.
Roasted ball oolong
One step left outThis route leaves out an operation the other performs. Omissions are usually irreversible — the step cannot be added back later.
No roast, in a tea oxidised as far as the ones that get one. The aroma this route is made for is volatile and roasting would replace it with caramel — so the route that has the most to protect is the one that stops earliest, which inverts the usual rule that heavier oxidation invites heavier fire.
Where it goes wrong
Too little feeding and the tea is an ordinary heavily oxidised oolong that cost three times what it should have. Too much, or an insect population that arrives and then collapses, and there is no crop worth picking. Because neither can be arranged, the standard commercial failure is not a manufacturing fault at all: it is unbitten leaf sold into a bitten tea's name, made heavily oxidised and heavily withered so that it reads as sweet, which is why honey character on its own is not evidence of anything.
In full
Every other route begins when leaf reaches a person. This one begins in the field, when tea green leafhoppers start feeding on the young shoots and the plant answers them. Fed-on shoots stop growing: they stay small, curl at the margin, yellow, and produce the volatile compounds that the finished tea is bought for. Only then is the crop picked, by hand, shoot by shoot, because bitten and unbitten material cannot be made into the same tea and no machine can tell them apart. From that point the manufacture is a recognisable oolong — sun wither, indoor rest, shaking, standing rest, a deep oxidation, fixation, rolling, drying — but every one of those operations is acting on leaf that arrived already altered, which is why the route produces a cup nothing else does from the same equipment. Two constraints make it expensive and neither is negotiable: the field cannot be sprayed, because the insects have to be there, and the yield is a fraction of a normal pluck, because a bitten shoot is small and light. The season is also inverted relative to almost every other Chinese-tradition tea — the best material comes off in the heat of summer, when leafhopper pressure is highest.