When you harvest the tea leaves, you must take great care to pick the right parts. Only the tea bud and the two adjacent leaves give you true quality. Sometimes, to prevent the tea pluckers from taking too much off, they are given a short piece of bamboo. This helps them pick just the right length of shoot and is a reminder of the standards of excellence required (like here at the Namring Tea Estate, Darjeeling, India).
28 July 2017
When we taste tea, we pay attention to the leaves at every stage. Of course we are interested in the liquor, which we drink, and we also examine the dried…
22 June 2012
Here, near Hangzhou (China), the tea leaves are being processed on the scorching sides of the wok. The leaves are heated before being shaped as required, then dried. They must be processed…
2 October 2015
To produce a high-quality tea, you must start by harvesting the leaves carefully; in other words, picking off the end shoot, the bud and the next two leaves. If you…
23 April 2010
On some tea plantations, they use a long bamboo stick to ensure a quality harvest. This photo taken in the Nilgiri (India) shows how it is used: the plucker has…
