While at Tea Trails, we went to Norwood Tea Factory, where we were given a most excellent and informative tour of the factory as well as the entire descriptive process of how tea is manufactured. Our guide's name was Andrew, he was formerly a tea planter for 25 years and in fact, he lived in Castlereigh for some of that time before Tea Trails was refurbished into a boutique hotel. I am writing a description of the process from what I remember from his tour and what I read in a book called Golden Tips - A Description of Ceylon And Its Great Tea Industry by H.W. Cave, published in 1900. The book was in our room.
My tea making explanation put together from the tour and the book follows the pictures (that I did my best to identify correctly!)
Work begins shortly after dawn. The superintendent assigns tasks to the labourers, including plucking, pruning, weeding, fertilizing and clearing surface drains. The plants are fertilized and any that get diseased are treated with copper oxide, although they are very hearty plants, unlike the coffee that came before them in the late 19th century. The pluckers are always women. Their baskets are carried suspended by ropes from their heads or they carry a cloth sling on their back and this is where they cast the leaves they pluck.
The tea plant will grow to 20 feet high and as wide if left alone. The planter keeps it down to 3 feet by constant pruning. This is done every 4 years. Each plant is allotted 12 square feet of surface soil so a fully planted acre contains 3,630 plants. The plants are plucked regularly every 8 or 9 days for 4 years until pruned again to a couple of inches above the last cut.
By 10 AM, the baskets of the most experienced pluckers are nearly full. The superintendent weighs them and checks for quality. The pluckers are allowed 30% unusable leaves (any leaves other than the very top 2 leaves plus the bud) and they must meet a quota of 16 kilos a day. The weighing happens 2 or 3 times daily and work quits at 4 PM.
The leaves are sorted and course leaves accidentally plucked are discarded. Next the leaves go through a number of manufacturing processes at the factory including withering, rolling, fermenting and firing.
Withering - the leaves are spread out on numerous meshed tables where industrial fans blow under them for about 1.5 hours. The object of withering is to allow the sap and wother moisture to evaporate until the leaf becomes soft and flaccid, rendering it susceptible to twisting by the rolling process.
The withered tea leaves go into the rollers next. Rolling squeezes out the tannin and any moisture left over after withering and gives the leaves a good twist. Next it is chopped, or broken, to free it from dirt and debris.
Next the tea leaves are spread out on a tile platform to ferment until it attains a bright copper tint. The rolling process induces fermentation (or oxidization). For green tea, this process is different as the withered leaves are steamed to stop any fermentation.
Once fermentation is complete, the tea gets fed up a belt into a large heating chamber where it gets fired, or heated, to 260 degrees farenheit. A current of hot air is passed through the fermented tea continually blowing it up and down within the chamber, and the tea dry and brittle and of a black color. This process lasts for no more than 2 hours and 20 minutes. This heating stops the fermentation and locks in the flavor of the tea.
Next it is extracted and sifted which sorts it into the various grades, including BOP, or broken orange pekoe, BOPF, or broken orange pekoe fine and then Dust, which is a very strong tea normally sold to the Middle East and Russia. The top tray has mesh large enough to sift all but the coarsest leaves, and so on until the mesh gets very small.
From here it gets packed and sent to a taster. The taster, or broker, sets an initial price which is haggled with the tea company manager until a price is agreed upon. Then an auction is held to sell to large tea companies, such as Dilmar and Lipton.