Picking Tea: A Bud and Two Leaves, and Turning It Into Tea

What you actually pick

The standard pick is the unopened bud at the very tip of a new shoot plus the two leaves immediately below it. That is the whole harvest unit, and it is what people mean by a fine pick. The bud is still furled and often has a silvery down on it, the first leaf below it is small and slightly folded, and the second is larger but still soft and flexible.

Everything further down the shoot is older leaf. It is edible, and taking a third or fourth leaf will give you more volume, but those leaves are tougher, less sweet and more bitter, and they make a coarser drink. Start with a bud and two leaves while you learn what your bush tastes like, then decide for yourself whether the extra leaf is worth it.

Pick by snapping the shoot off with a fingernail or a thumbnail against a finger, taking it just above where the stem starts to harden and change color. Do not pull, which tears the bark down the remaining stem, and do not use scissors on small quantities, which crushes the cut end and gives a grassy taste. On a large bush that has been trained flat, shears are a reasonable trade of quality for speed.

A new flush comes about every two to four weeks through the growing season, depending on warmth and water, and you pick each one as it reaches the right stage. This is the part that surprises people who expect a single annual harvest: a tea bush is picked repeatedly all season, and the shorter the interval the better the leaf, because you are always taking the softest growth.

Green, oolong and black are the same leaf

This is the single fact that reframes the whole crop for most people. Green tea, oolong and black tea are not different plants and not different leaves. They are the same bud and two leaves from the same bush, treated differently in the hours after they are picked. What separates them is oxidation: how far the picked leaf is allowed to react with air before heat is applied to stop it.

As soon as a leaf is picked and bruised, enzymes in it start oxidising its compounds, and the leaf darkens and its flavor deepens from grassy toward malty and fruity. Heat destroys those enzymes and freezes the process wherever it has got to. Green tea is leaf heated almost immediately so that no oxidation happens at all. Black tea is leaf rolled to break its cells and then left to oxidise fully until it is coppery brown before drying. Oolong is stopped somewhere in between.

Because the deciding factor is timing and not equipment, all three are genuinely makeable at home from one bush, and it is worth making a small batch of each from the same picking to taste the difference directly. The leaf is identical, so any difference in the cup came from what you did after picking.

Withering comes first for every style: the fresh leaf is spread out somewhere warm, shaded and airy for several hours until it goes limp and loses its squeak, which makes it flexible enough to roll without shattering. Green tea is the exception in that it is often given only a brief wither, or none, before the heat.

1. Wither the picked leaf Spread the leaf one layer deep on a tray in a warm, shaded, airy place for six to eighteen hours until it goes limp and a shoot can be bent without snapping. Skip or shorten this for green tea.
2. For green tea, heat at once Steam the fresh leaf for about a minute, or dry pan it in a wok over moderate heat for two to three minutes, moving it constantly until it smells cooked rather than raw. This stops all oxidation.
3. For black tea, roll hard Roll the withered leaf firmly between your palms or on a board for ten to twenty minutes until it twists, darkens and feels wet. You are breaking the cells so the whole leaf can oxidise.
4. Let black tea oxidise Spread the rolled leaf an inch (2 to 3 cm) deep somewhere warm and humid and leave it until it has turned coppery brown and smells of fruit rather than grass, usually two to four hours. Cover it with a damp cloth if the air is dry.
5. For oolong, stop it halfway Bruise the leaf gently by tossing it in a basket rather than rolling it hard, leave it to oxidise only until the leaf edges have reddened while the centers stay green, then heat it to stop the process.
6. Dry everything fully Dry the finished leaf in an oven at its lowest setting, or a dehydrator, until it is brittle and crumbles between your fingers, then cool it completely before it goes into an airtight jar.

Yield, timing and the mistakes that cost you

Be realistic about volume. Fresh leaf loses roughly three quarters of its weight in drying, so four ounces (about 100 g) of picked shoots makes about one ounce (25 g) of finished tea, which is perhaps a dozen cups. A well grown mature bush gives a useful amount over a whole season precisely because you pick it many times, not because any single picking is large.

Pick in the morning after any dew has dried. Wet leaf will not wither evenly and tends to go musty rather than fragrant during oxidation. Leaf picked in the heat of the afternoon is already slightly limp and starts oxidising in the basket before you are ready for it, which is fine for black tea and unhelpful for green.

Do not pile fresh leaf deep in a bucket. It heats, crushes itself under its own weight and starts oxidising unevenly on the way indoors, and no amount of care afterwards recovers it. Use a shallow open basket and get it onto the withering tray within an hour.

The other common loss is picking too hard too late in the season. Shoots taken in the last weeks before cold weather were the growth that should have hardened off to carry the bush through winter. Stop picking well before the first frosts and let the final flush mature on the plant.

Store the finished tea in an airtight, opaque container away from heat, and keep it away from spices and coffee. Dried tea takes up smells from its surroundings very readily, which is how scented teas are made deliberately and how good home made tea is ruined accidentally.

Keeping a picking record

Tea is one of the few garden crops where a written record changes the result almost immediately, because you are making the same product repeatedly under slightly different conditions and can compare them directly. Note the date of each picking, the rough weight of fresh leaf, and how many days it had been since the previous picking from that bush.

Then record what you did with it: how long you withered it and in what conditions, how long you let it oxidise, and how it tasted. After a single season this tells you your own bush's flush interval, which flush of the year gives the best leaf, and the oxidation time that suits your climate. Almost everyone finds that the first flush of spring is the finest and that oxidation runs faster in humid weather than the general instructions assume.

Keep the record by bush if you have more than one plant. Seed grown tea plants vary noticeably between individuals, and after two or three years it usually becomes clear that one plant is worth picking earlier or harder than the others.