From our second green tea batch starting with 252g fresh leaf to…
…3.6 kg
Perhaps a little ambitious in hindsight.
Nevertheless we persisted.
Our intention was to pan fry kill-green.
Restricted by our equipment of two small kitchen woks and the volume of fresh leaf, this had to be carried out in batches.
Turns out in practice this is not suitable. While you pan fire one batch the other leaves are left to continue withering and oxidising, so it didn’t work as intended for a successful kill-green, but we tried anyway.
We then rolled it in the rolling machine for about an hour. Swapping from previous hand rolling in muslin, this was a complete change of tactics, which in turn meant we were changing the rolling time, and also rolling pressure.
Hand rolling also gives you breaks to tease the tea leaves which in turn lets the leaf rest for a short time.
Sweet notes were greeting us while it was in the rolling machine.
The fruity sweetness we experienced while rolling the leaves were a sign that my concerns about the kill-green processing were coming to fruition, with visible oxidisation on the leaf too.
Leaf oxidisation cannot be reversed, but it can be halted. Should we try and put it back in the pan? At this point would this help to stop further oxidisation?
Time travel not being an option, we continued to the next step which was drying.
The leaf was very wet when it came out the roller, what would this mean for drying?
Unsurprisingly it meant waiting a long time for the leaves to dry fully.
Checking on the leaves after a few hours, they were still full of water.
So we waited and we left it to dry more.
And we waited more.
I refused to be defeated.
I also really wanted to have some of the tea to taste.
After many hours, I was sent home with 200g of the leaf that was actually dry and Donald was left to dry the rest.
At about 10:00 PM that evening, I finally got home.
We were a little over enthusiastic with this batch, scaling the tea process is not easy it turns out.
Batch pan firing the leaves did not work for green tea, the kill-green was not completed properly as we were trying to get through many batches of the leaf.
Ti Deuchainn does taste wonderful in it’s own right.
Ti Deuchainn, Gaelic for tea experiment. Was an experiment, with incredible results.
It is not a green tea, as the leaf is partially oxidised it is more akin to an oolong tea. This will never be made again, a unique tea, a stepping stone in our pursuit of green tea.
A noteworthy point in our journey to create green tea with Guisachan grown tea leaves.
