Roasted ball oolong
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.
What makes this route what it is
The shaping and the finishing are usually a matched pair — pellet with a light bake, strip with a heavy roast — and this route breaks the pair. Everything difficult about it follows from that single mismatch: a shape chosen for slow release in the pot, put through a heat treatment designed for a shape that opens itself to the fire.
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 three or four leaves, as for any oolong. The route's demands come later, and the material choice is not what separates it from its neighbours.
Short and judged by the maker. Taken slightly further here than in the light rolled route because the target oxidation is deeper.
The indoor rest after the sun, in which the leaf equalises before any agitation begins.
Shaking in drums or baskets, harder and for more cycles than a jade-green manufacture would allow, because a leaf that is going under charcoal needs more oxidised material for the fire to work on.
The still hours between shakes. The aroma target here is not the orchid top note the light styles stop at — the maker is looking for a heavier, riper register that will survive the roast rather than be erased by it.
Confined to the bruised margin as in every oolong, but taken further, which is most of why a traditional Tieguanyin pours amber where a modern one pours pale gold before any roasting is considered.
The same judged moment as in the other oolong routes, taken at a deeper point.
Cloth-wrapped compression cycles until the leaf sets as a hard pellet. Repeated many times over hours, and it is the step that makes everything after it harder.
Interleaved with the rolling rather than following it, because the leaf must stay pliable to keep taking the shape. Deliberately not a finish — the roast still has to have something to act on.
Hours over banked charcoal at a heat kept low because the pellet is dense. The first of two or three rounds rather than a single operation, and the round count is the producer's signature.
Electric baking cabinets are now common and are not a lesser tool by definition; the difference that matters is whether the schedule is long and low or short and hot, and either machine can be run either way.
Weeks sealed and untouched between rounds, during which the fire note recedes far enough for the tea to be judged at all. The next round is decided here, which is why this manufacture cannot be compressed into a week.
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.
The two routes are the same tea up to a point. Everything before the divergence is shared; everything after it is not.
The Anxi schism, as a step number. Through the rolling and the interleaved drying the two routes are the same manufacture run at two intensities; at step ten one finishes with a light bake and the other enters a roast-and-rest loop lasting months. The two products are sold under one name, and the difference between them is entirely in what happens after the pellet exists.
One position in the route is filled by a different named method. The shape of the route is unchanged.
Same roast, different shape going into it. A strip offers the fire a great deal of surface and roasts evenly; a pellet offers almost none and has to be persuaded slowly. That is why the two traditions arrived at different roasting schedules from the same charcoal.
Where it goes wrong
A fast, hot roast on a pellet colours the outside and leaves the centre untouched, so the tea reads as roasted for two or three infusions and then reads as the green oolong it always was underneath. The other standard failure is roasting to hide something: heavy fire over a poorly made or stale base, which is why an experienced buyer of these teas judges the fourth infusion rather than the first.
In full
The catalogue's two existing oolong routes divide the family cleanly and, on their own terms, correctly: a light rolled route that compacts the leaf into a pellet and finishes it with a light bake, and a strip route that twists the leaf loose and then roasts and rests it for months. Real production has a third arrangement that takes one half from each — leaf rolled into a hard pellet AND then taken through the roasting loop — and it is not a marginal case. It is the traditional manufacture of Tieguanyin, of Dong Ding, and of the Taiwanese charcoal styles, and in Anxi it stands on one side of an open commercial argument. The modern qingxiang manufacture takes the oxidation lighter, keeps the leaf jade green and bakes it only enough to set it; the traditional nongxiang manufacture takes the oxidation further and then puts the finished pellet over charcoal for hours, rests it for weeks, and decides whether to go again. Both are sold as the same named tea. The pellet makes the roast harder to run than a strip does — a compacted ball presents very little surface, so heat has to be low and long or it toasts an outside that a dense interior never feels — and that difficulty is exactly why the roasted ball styles are the ones most often faked with a fast high fire.