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Orthodox black tea

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

Black tea8 steps工夫紅茶The whole of the fine black tea trade: Darjeeling, Assam's orthodox lines, Sri Lanka, Nilgiri, Nepal, Kenya's orthodox factories, and the Chinese gongfu black teas of Fujian, Anhui and Yunnan, which run the same shape with markedly gentler settings.

What makes this route what it is

The heat is last. In every green tea route it is first or second, and in oolong it is in the middle; here the only heat in the whole route is the drier, and its job is to stop a reaction rather than to make one impossible. Rolling before oxidation rather than after fixation is the same fact stated from the other end.

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.

  1. 1.

    Hand plucking

    Not always done

    Fine plucking is what makes an orthodox tea worth the extra manufacture; the route can handle coarser leaf and there is little point paying for the rest of it if you do.

    Machine-harvested leaf goes down orthodox lines in Kenya, Malawi and Argentina, where the intake is uniform enough for the sorting to cope.

  2. 2.

    Trough withering

    Hours of controlled airflow, and how far the wither runs is a separate decision from how it is done. A light wither keeps the floral top notes of a first flush; a hard one gives the clean maceration that a heavy roller needs.

  3. 3.

    Orthodox processing

    Twisted and pressed rather than cut, so the leaf survives as leaf. Oxidation begins the moment the first cells rupture, which means this step and the next one overlap rather than following one another.

  4. 4.

    Repeat rolling and roll-breaking (fu rou)

    Two or three passes, with the compacted lumps broken and the already-fine fraction sifted out between them. The fractions are kept apart and oxidised separately, which is where grade differences within one day's manufacture actually originate.

  5. 5.

    Controlled-environment oxidation

    The wait, in a cool near-saturated room. Ended by judgement rather than by clock, and ended by moving the leaf into the drier rather than by any separate operation.

  6. 6.

    Drying

    The only heat in the route. Its first job is to stop the oxidation and its second is to take the tea to storage dryness, in that order.

  7. 7.

    Sorting and grading

    Screens, winnower, stemmer and increasingly an optical sorter. Produces the whole-leaf, broken, fannings and dust classes, which describe extraction speed and not quality.

  8. 8.

    Blending to a standard

    Not always done

    Bulking within a garden, or blending across origins to a buyer's standard. Most black tea in the world reaches a drinker through this step.

    Single-lot estate teas skip it, which is exactly what a lot number is claiming.

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.

  • Chinese pan-fired green tea

    Same steps, different orderat step 6

    Both routes use the same operations. Only their positions differ, and that is the whole of the difference between the two teas.

    Both routes pluck, work the leaf and apply heat. Here the heat is sixth and there it is third, and the hours in between are the entire difference between a red liquor and a green one. This is the single most useful comparison in tea.

  • CTC black tea

    Same step, different methodat step 3

    One position in the route is filled by a different named method. The shape of the route is unchanged.

    One slot, two machines. Twisting keeps the leaf whole and extraction gradual; cutting maximises surface area and gives everything up in ninety seconds. The rest of the route is unchanged, which is why the two are so often mistaken for quality tiers rather than for what they are.

Where it goes wrong

An oxidation bed that is too deep overheats in the middle and sours, and a bed that is too shallow dries at the surface and stops changing, so one lot arrives at the drier containing both. Under-withered leaf smears in the roller instead of twisting, which ruptures it unevenly and produces the same split result by a different path.

In full

The orthodox route inverts the green tea route completely. Leaf is withered for hours until it is limp enough to twist without shattering, then rolled — twisted and pressed rather than cut, so it survives largely intact — and the rupture releases the leaf's own enzymes onto its own compounds in the presence of air. What follows is not an operation so much as a supervised wait: the ruptured leaf is spread in shallow beds in a cool, near-saturated room and left to brown, judged by colour and above all by smell as the sharp green note gives way to apple, then to full fruit. Only then does the leaf meet heat, in the drier, and the first seconds of drying are what stop the reaction. Everything characteristic of black tea — the red liquor, the malt, the body that stands up to milk, the absence of any green note at all — is the product of that wait, and the wait is only possible because the heat was withheld.

Teas made this way

Other black tea routes