Harvest – Discovering Tea

Fingers of steel

6 March 2025

The appearance of the man in the pink hat is deceptive. Beneath his innocent-looking pastel camouflage are fearsome fingers of steel. With razor blades clipped to each forefinger, he moves swiftly between the rows of tea plants, plucking the bud and the next two leaves at lightning speed.

In over thirty years of travelling through tea producing countries, I’ve come across some amazing gadgets, but I’ve never seen digits extended by steel blades before. Tea is still harvested by hand in many countries around the world, which is a good thing. Some pickers are finding ingenious ways to speed up the process and reap the rewards.

A distinctive style

21 February 2025

In Taiwan, many tea pickers come from Vietnam. They have their own distinctive way of layering colourful clothing and sometimes combine this with bright protective covers on their fingertips to prevent their skin from turning black after a day of picking leaves.

The experience of plucking tea

29 November 2024

To understand tea and how it’s made, there’s nothing like experiencing it first hand, starting with plucking, when the young leaves are selected for processing. It’s only by doing it yourself that you can truly appreciate the precision, care and difficulty involved in every stage of making a tea, especially one of premium quality.
Here in Kalapani (Nepal), Céline, who manages the entire supply chain for Palais des Thés, is being shown how to pluck tea, and is concentrating on picking the bud and the top two leaves from each shoot that has reached the desired stage of growth.

A quality harvest

10 May 2024

Tea doesn’t harvest itself. It’s important to me to highlight the work of the people who pick the buds and the next two leaves from each shoot that make up a quality plucking. This delicate work, still done by hand in many countries, is particularly important because it is impossible to produce a good tea if the leaves are not picked carefully enough in the first place.

Precision mechanics

29 September 2023

The Japanese are remarkably ingenious when it comes to harvesting tea. In the rest of the world, the leaves are hand-picked by legions of workers, but in Japan, labour is really expensive and so the growers have to do it themselves. This means using machines, each as well designed as the next. The quality of production is not affected by this mechanisation, as the Japanese are generally meticulous and take great care to do everything properly. Once the leaves have been gathered at the processing site, a sophisticated tool with an electronic eye is used to check that their shape, size, structure and colour are of the required quality.

Barley and buckwheat

28 July 2023

There’s more to life than tea. There’s also barley and buckwheat. The seeds are roasted and then infused. It’s delicious hot or cold and has always been popular in Japan. In France, these crops are grown in Brittany, which is good because we don’t have to get it from the other side of the world. In the autumn, I’ll be introducing you to Yoann, a self-described “Breton alternative roaster”. By then, the ripe ears of barley will have been cut and the beautiful buckwheat flowers will have had time to go to seed. I hope you all have a wonderful summer.

Zen garden

19 July 2023

In Japan, a very orderly country, the tea bushes are tended in the neatest rows. They form a kind of Zen garden, and in Kyoto and many other parts of the archipelago, whenever you see them you just want to sit down and take it all in. The aesthetic is captivating.

Organic farming: room for improvement

7 July 2023

Following my last post, I received some comments that I thought would be interesting to discuss. Firstly, I’d like to say that I have a deep affection for India and have visited the Darjeeling region dozens of times, which shows how much it means to me. And Palais des Thés has taken many initiatives over more than 30 years to promote the wonderful teas from this part of the world.

I’d like to stress that this pesticide problem, which should never happen with tea, especially bearing the AB organic label, doesn’t just concern India. The same thing could be happening in other countries. I have the following comments to share with you from producer friends:

– The pesticide in question is not easy to find, and its use in tea has become extremely rare. On the other hand, DDT has been sprayed by the authorities in very isolated cases to control malaria in particularly infested areas. These sprays, which would be better if substitutes were used, can end up on surrounding crops.

– The creation of planted barriers between roads and fields, and around homes, has been the subject of much discussion with regional health authorities. This is an easy solution to implement in cases where it’s essential to combat the presence of mosquitoes carrying the malaria parasite.

– Sometimes, the person in charge of certification is too close to the plot owner, which can undermine the professionalism of the work and result in inadequate inspection.

I think it’s important to point out something that few people are aware of: AB-type organic certification is essentially based on the examination of various documents, and the organisations in charge of these certifications don’t carry out regular laboratory analyses. Our health and that of our customers is paramount, which is why I’m approaching this subject in the simplest and most transparent way possible.

Hojicha, a wonderful roasted tea

23 June 2023

The most famous Japanese roasted tea, Hojicha (or Houjicha) is made from Bancha tea harvested in the autumn. After being processed using the traditional Japanese green tea method (steaming, shaping, drying), the leaves are roasted at 150°C for five minutes and then at 300°C for another five minutes. Nowadays, Hojicha is consumed more in those parts of the country where tea doesn’t grow, i.e. north of Tokyo, mainly on the island of Hokkaido. For food lovers, serve Hojicha lukewarm or at room temperature and pair its woody, animal notes with a Pont-l’Evêque, Livarot or any other soft cheese with a washed or bloomy rind.

Mechanised harvesting

16 June 2023

In Japan, the most prestigious harvest of the year takes place between late April and early May. This is when the famous Ichibancha, or first-flush teas, are made. The next plucking takes place in early June. This produces some interesting teas, but they aren’t up to the standard of the previous harvest. Here, on the outskirts of Shizuoka, I’m taking part in my own way, riding a Kawasaki that’s very different from the ones you see on our city streets. Because of the cost of labour, Japan is one of the few countries in the world that uses machines to pick its tea leaves.