Speaker: So I am talk a little bit about what are the different types of tea are or again what tea isn't and a little bit about the health benefits of tea. How tea is manufactured? Different types of tea and then we will smell and taste some of the teas and I will be happy to answer any of your questions if I am able to and I will spend as much time with you as you want.
So to start with, and some of you may know some of this and it's -- I apologize for covering information that you know. Tea, when they say tea what we in the tea industry are talking about is any product that only comes from the Camellia Sinensis plant all “true” tea comes from that one plant. So anything that doesn't come from the Camellia Sinensis plant, caramel, pepper mint or herbal tea that a lot of people drink red zinger, stuff that people are familiar with, that's actually not technically tea. The real term for that are tea flowers. Anything that is an infusion of fruit or an infusion of herbs or an infusion of any other plant is a Tisane. Rooibos that we were smelling over here and it's become very, very popular, is not tea.
I don't care if people call it tea. There are some people who will say no, no it's not tea. You can call it whatever you want but just to know that today I am going to be focusing on “true” tea, the infusion that comes from the Camellia Sinensis plant. Now, just because there is only one plant that leads to tea doesn't mean that there aren't thousands of types of tea just like wine comes from a grape and there are thousands of kinds of wine. So what makes one tea different from another is related to a variety of different factors where the tea was grown. Tea tends to come from countries in Asia, but some countries in Africa and even South America are now growing tea.
Tea is grown in one plantation in the United States down in South Carolina. It is not the highest quality tea. We just don't really have the best climate for growing tea. So where the tea was grown will affect how the tea comes out, but also more importantly how the tea was processed. So we know that there are different types of teas. White tea, we have heard of green tea, black tea. Any tea leaf that pops out of the ground has potential to be white tea, green tea, black tea. The forth category is oolong and that is a sort of a cross between green and white and I will explain what that is. The difference in white tea, green tea and black is the way it's processed.
I will work around a jar of white tea, a jar of green tea and jar with black tea just so that you can take a look. You can open up any of these jars and one that says Silver Needles white tea, center is the green tea and Orange pekoe and it's actually pronounced pekoe is the black tea. So you could -- taste them around, open them up, smell them you could sort of see the difference.
To tell you about the journey of the tea leaf going from being a white tea leaf to a green tea leaf to a black tea leaf and I think a good way to do that would be to imagine if the tree in your backyard was a tea plant. Hey so if you went outside your into backyard and you plucked the leaf off of the tree in your backyard and you did nothing to it. You just put it on the table and you let it dry naturally, completely unprocessed and just allowed it to do its thing, that would be white tea. White tea is just plucked and unprocessed. So a line of research is suggesting that white tea maybe the healthiest of all of the teas because of it retains all of the inherent natural properties of the tea leaf.
The one that you are looking at the silver needles over there is the highest quality of white tea. It's only picked during a couple of weeks out of the year in spring in the Fu Jian province of China. So it's a very rare tea. The infusion, the drink that you get from a white tea like silver needle is a very, very delicate. It's very pale in color. The first time I tried it, I didn't really have such a great palate when I started this and I tasted and I thought I was being duped. I said, this is like water. I just said, I am paying $7 for cup of water. It's really, really expensive. So the white tea is like I said it's delicate and it's also as not as dense because it's just the leaf itself drying naturally, nothing is done with it. So that's white tea.
Now, let's say you plucked that leaf, the same leaf off from the tree and you rolled it up, that would break the cell walls of the tea leaf and it will allow enzymes to start acting on the tea leaf and it will start to change the chemistry of the tea leaf. If you left it out all day long. If you thought about the leaf that you picked up your tree and you plucked it and you crunched it all up, it will start to turn black, it would darken. That's the process by which green tea turn into black tea. It's the oxidation that happens when the cell wall is broken on the leaves.
If you want it to be green tea, and not black tea what they do is they style or they steam or somehow heat the tea leaf, the minute the break the cell wall and it's exaggerating, but right after they cell wall to keep that oxidizing from occurring. So you could think about, if you steam some broccoli or if you pan roast some vegetables, it would keep any chemical changes from occurring. So that's what is happening when they are making green tea.
So white tea completely unprocessed, green tea is sort of plucked and they allow it to wither and they roll it up and then they stop the chemistry from changing by doing that. If they don't stop the chemistry from changing the choice is at point are, they can have an oolong or a black tea. If they allow the leaf to completely oxidize, they just let it completely turn black, it becomes a black tea. If they stop the oxidation process, part way, anyway along the way that's called an oolong, a partially oxidized tea. Makes sense of that? The real difference. So any tea leaf really has the potential to be a green tea or white tea or oolong or black tea. However, at some places tend to make better greens. Some geography is well known for oolong. Taiwan is very well known for oolong and some parts China.
Also where the leaf is grown. So the places in north India all produce a richer type of tea than some places in south India even if they process the tea completely the same. So that's how the tea is processed.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services