The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea - Michael Harney [14]
My broker, Marcus Wulf, and I started in Tunxi, looking for tea sources. We drove to an organic garden several hours outside the town. The mountain road could not have been more idyllic, twisting up the tree-lined mountains alongside a rushing stream. We found harvesters out in the mist gathering the tips and leaves. We could see our breath, the air was so cold.
Ordinarily, pickers toss fistfuls of tea into vast hampers strapped to their backsides. The leaves of the Huangshan Mao Feng are so small that these harvesters nestled the leafsets into holders no more than a few inches in diameter. Once their tiny baskets were full, the harvesters descended on foot to the nearby village, where the tea was processed. The mist was rolling in with the sunset; we were loath to leave such a pretty spot. But we were also anxious to watch the tea being made, so we followed them and strolled through town.
Most of the teas in this chapter are made entirely by hand; Huangshan is one of the few made almost entirely by machines. At the Huangshan factory we saw, men began the process, giving the teas an initial fixing by pressing them gently with their palms over hot woks. Several well-calibrated machines then finished the job. A series of high partitions rocked the leaves back and forth like a baby in a cradle, to dry out the tea. This last agitator also gave the tea its characteristic slight curve, while preserving the down.
While not quite as famous as Lung Ching, Huangshan Mao Feng is one of China’s most celebrated green teas. Commonly found in the better tea markets around China, Huangshan Mao Feng became a tribute tea during the Qing dynasty. It is such an ancient tea, it was no surprise to find that so many people in the area still know how to make the tea by hand. In a system unique to China, where notions of private property are less strongly held, tea farms and factories regularly allow employees to take small amounts of the harvest to make tea for themselves. While passing through the village, Marcus and I saw several people making tea in their houses; in the restaurant where we stopped for dinner, we found the cook in the kitchen making Huangshan Mao Feng by hand to sell for spending cash. Handmade Huangshan is so rare, it is now a popular gift among businessmen. The factory managers with us gladly bought a few ounces.
The cook let me try my hand at shaping the leaves, showing me how to move the tea against the metal to get the leaves in a straight line. It looked easy, but I made a hash of it; I couldn’t give the leaves any shape at all. His work was sublime, creating far more beautiful, downy leaves than the factory produced. For a moment I entertained thoughts of sourcing handmade Huangshan Mao Feng. I asked him how much he could make an hour. Once upon a time, tea factories employed hundreds of men shaping tea over woks just like this. Today, handmade Huangshan is a luxury few can afford. He explained that six hours of work would yield half a kilo of finished tea. I buy roughly thirty kilos of Huangshan a year. He would need two months to make that much, but the harvest itself lasts only ten days. When I brewed his tea, I was relieved to discover that its refinements did not merit its price. The equipment tea makers have designed to replace human