The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea - Michael Harney [57]
SORTING
After firing, tea makers sort the teas by leaf size by agitating the leaves through a series of screens. Whole leaves impart the fullest array of flavors; they are separated out first for the best-quality teas. The next smaller particles are called “brokens”; they make strong, brisk cups of tea. The smallest particles are called “fannings” and “dust.” Fannings get their name from the fans that were once used to sort them: Before the age of machines, tea makers sorted the leaves by tossing them into the air from a large bamboo fan. The leaves light enough to blow off onto the floor were separated as fannings; the ones large enough to fall back into the fan were reserved as the best tea. Today, fannings and dust are set aside for teabags and instant teas. With only a few noted exceptions, all the teas in this book are whole-leaf teas.
APPENDIX
Tea Through Time: A Brief History
The history of tea is more complex and spectacular than I can convey here, and I heartily recommend that you draw on other sources to get to know the ways the commodity has shaped our world. To educate your palate, it helps to get down a few facts, if only to allow you to understand why tea comes in so many forms.
Trying to establish when tea was first made—and in what form—is like trying to establish in what year Hades built the underworld. Tea marketers have every incentive to mythologize, hardly any to be accurate, and it all began so long ago. As a Taiwanese tea broker once admitted to me, “Legend works much better than fact if you want to keep a customer at the counter. There’s much more to talk about.”
We can say for certain that tea first grew wild in the Himalayan foothills, in what today are parts of China and India. Humans first started drinking tea approximately five thousand years ago in the mountains of southwest China in what is now Yunnan province. The first harvesters merely toppled the trees in spring, before learning how to pluck the bushes continuously. The dried leaves were preserved in tightly compressed cakes.
Cultivated initially for its medicinal qualities, tea was consumed as a kind of bitter green leaf vegetable soup, primarily by practitioners of Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. Simultaneously calming and stimulating, though also incredibly bitter, the crude beverage held devotees of all three religions in the ideal clear state of mind during their lessons and meditations. All three practices sprouted and flourished in China during the political turmoil of the latter end of the Zhou dynasty (1122-256 BC). Each school played an important role in the dissemination of tea from its mountain roots to the wider Asian continent, particularly Buddhism. As the religion spread eastward from the Himalayas into Japan and Southeast Asia, tea went with it. Monks cultivated the tea, creating the first methods of propagation and selling the beverage to support their monasteries. They also taught area farmers how to grow their beverage. In the ninth century AD, while China was enjoying a fad for steam-fixed green teas, Buddhists first brought tea to Japan from a monastery in China (see “Jin Shan,” page 35). Three hundred years later, a Japanese monk named Eisai, who would found the Japanese arm of Zen Buddhism, brought over Chinese powdered green tea now known as Matcha.
Tea first flourished in Japan around the imperial capital of Kyoto. The great tea gardens still stand in Uji on the