Green Tea
What is green tea?
We define ‘green’ tea as tea that is unoxidized; the leaves preserve their natural green colour, just as if they were freshly picked. If you allowed these leaves to wither a bit, they would become yellowish (we call those ‘oolong’); further withering would produce dark brown leaves, which we call ‘black’ tea.
Killing the Green (杀青, or shāqīng in pinyin) is a colourful name for a critical process to keep the tea ‘green’. It boils down to applying heat to de-activate the enzymes that enable the oxidization process. The two most popular ways of doing this are:
- Steaming: used in Japanese sencha, but also known to be used in some traditional Chinese green tea, such as Enshi YuLu (恩施玉露); note that the characters for YuLu (‘jade dew’) are identical to those for Japanese gyokuro. This process was prevented throughout most of China until the Ming Dynasty.
- Pan-firing: used in the vast majority of Chinese green tea styles… but also in kamairicha, a style of tea that is popular in Miyazaki, Kochi, and a few other places in Japan.
In this collection, you will find anything from delicate pan-fired green teas to intensely green, shade grown Japanese classics (e.g. gyokuro, kabusecha and tencha).
