Pine-smoked souchong
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.
What makes this route what it is
Heat in the middle of a black tea route. Every other black tea applies its first heat in the drier, after oxidation has been allowed to finish; this one interrupts the oxidation with a pan and then goes back to rolling. That interruption is a fixation step inside a black tea, which is a sentence that should not be possible, and it is why the resulting tea sits oddly against every description of the category.
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.
An open shoot with some maturity, not a fine bud standard. The route puts the leaf through a pan and a second rolling, and delicate material does not survive it.
Carried out on racks in a loft above a pine fire, so the wither and the first exposure to smoke are the same operation. This is the point most descriptions miss.
Ordinary orthodox twisting, on leaf that has already taken up some smoke.
Allowed to run, but not to completion — the next step exists to interrupt it, which no other black tea route does.
A very brief pass through a hot pan, guo hong guo. It arrests the oxidation part-way and leaves the leaf soft, and both of those consequences are the reason it is here.
A second rolling, possible only because the pan step left the leaf pliable. It tightens the strip on a leaf that has already stopped changing colour.
Drying over pine in the same loft the tea was withered in. The smoke is a drying medium here, not a flavouring applied to a finished tea.
Unsmoked souchong dries over a neutral heat instead, using the identical route up to this point. It is now the larger trade of the two.
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.
A pan step in the middle of a black tea, which no other black tea route has. It stops the oxidation early and leaves the leaf soft enough to roll again, and both of those are why this tea does not taste like the malt-and-body profile the category is described by.
One position in the route is filled by a different named method. The shape of the route is unchanged.
The drying slot, filled by a pine fire rather than a neutral drier. Because the same loft was used for the wither, the smoke is present at both ends of the route rather than laid on at the finish, which is audibly different from smoking a finished tea.
Where it goes wrong
Smoking a finished tea is the shortcut, and it is what most tea sold as lapsang has had done to it: heavy smoke laid over a black tea made by an ordinary route, which reads as tar rather than as resin and covers the leaf instead of sitting under it. The genuine version is comparatively lightly smoked, because the smoke has been present throughout rather than applied at the end.
In full
The Wuyi souchong route is the most unusual black tea manufacture in the catalogue and the least well described in English, where it is usually reduced to the smoke. Leaf is withered in a wooden loft above a slow pine fire, so smoke is present from the first hours rather than being added at the end. It is rolled and oxidised in the ordinary way. Then comes the step no other black tea has: a very brief pass through a hot pan, which arrests the oxidation part-way and, crucially, does so before the leaf is dry. The still-pliable leaf is rolled a second time, which is possible only because the pan step left it soft, and it is then dried over pine in the same loft. The smoke is therefore not a finish applied to a completed tea; it brackets the route, and the pan step in the middle is what makes the tea's characteristic combination of a dark liquor with a surviving sweetness rather than full malt.