As it turned out, the machine-picked tea
leaves are very beautiful! Since you can
collect the tea leaves such beautifully by a machine, I might not able to tell
the difference in taste between the hand-picked and the machine-picked
tea. I wonder if there is much advantage
on expensive hand picking. What do you
think?
By machine
picking, you shear the surface of the plants in one stroke and collect the
fresh buds and leaves. I thought that
it would contain some old stiff leaves and twigs, but I didn’t find any of them
in the collected leaves as shown in the picture above. I knew that you trim the surface in the fall
and spring to make it even and to prevent mixing the old leaves and twigs when
harvesting. But I didn’t know that you
can adjust the height of the shearing surface with such great accuracy. That makes a good quality of harvest
possible.
Now, let’s go
back to my question in the beginning.
What is the advantage of hand-picked tea? I’ll talk about it on the next post.
Posts
For me, I just like the idea of tea being picked by hand. Just my opinion.
ReplyDeleteHi, michele-san, I understand that hand work sounds better^^
DeleteI would think that had picking allows the tea maker to be more selective about only using buds, or not having to deal with insect damage on leaves.
ReplyDeleteExactly, the famer can be more selective!
DeleteI haven’t thought about insect damages. Anna-san, you have a good point (^^) Now I’m curious about how the famers are dealing with the insect damages.
This comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteHi Kohei-san,
Deletehere's Alessandro speaking. I've made up my mind and have signed up for a Blogger account.
Insect damage sometimes is useful. For example for taiwanese hi-grown oolongs insect bites produces a reaction in the leaf such that on subsequent processing a certain aroma comes out from the tea.
It's mainly leafhopper bites.
Insect bites prove that the tea bushes are not sprayed with pesticides and it's a plus imho. It's the natural certificate that the tea is genuinely organic.
:-)
P.S.: I've deleted my post only to repost it because I've made a mistake with my English. Now it's corrected.
Hi, SpiritOfPeace-san,
DeleteI didn’t know about insect bites. Thanks for the informationヽ(^。^)ノ
http://www.pref.kyoto.jp/chaken/seika_top.html
ReplyDeleteThank you (^^)
DeleteThank you for the beautiful work and the unshared
ReplyDelete