Mauna Kea Tea

Mauna Kea Tea focuses on:

• 100%Hawaiian Grown and Proccessed
• Unique proccessing for Pure & Clean Tasting Tea
• Breeding Unique Tea Varieties for Natural Farming

Safe for People, Safe for Land

Mechanical or machine harvest tend to cause uneven harvest. Some young leaves and some younger leaves. For example, ones at the level of the cutting surface is plucked full size while ones a few inches below the cutting surface is plucked only at the tip and ones flushed early may include slightly older leaves. Often times plucking surface is cut even before harvest so no old leaves are harvested. and younger leaves included in your harvest does not degrade the quality much like older leaves. It could be better. The mechanical harvest does not retain leaf shape completely.

Although hand plucking generally acheive better quality due to more selective plucking, it is also influenced by pluckers' experience level. Inexperienced pluckers do not know subtle balance of hand pressure and tenderness of the harvestable leaves for desired tea quality. Bad plucking tends to damage leaves and cause faster degradation.

There are some regions that found a way to take advantage of seasonality to process and express different characteristics. In such case, spring harvest, summer harvest, winter harvest are all interesting to compare, or maybe not compare but enjoy separately.

Elevation
High altitude tends to have higher quality than low land (sea level) because of lower temperature keeps the young succulent shoots from hardening although low land tea might grow faster because of higher temperature. Elevation too high can be problem due to frost damage. Tea is basically sub-tropical plant and does not like frost very much. Certain varieties are bred to withstand frost, but they may compromise some qualities.

Green Tea Processing

Basic green tea processing goes through following steps.

Heating (De-emzyme) -> Rolling -> Drying

These steps are slightly or greatly modified depending on regional variations and types of green tea processing to reach the end product. For example, longjin or dragon well is pan-fired and shaped into flat leaf while sencha is steamed and rolled into needle shape.
De-emzyme - Initial heating process

By heating the green leaf, enzyme present in tea leaf becomes dysfunctional. Emzyme is responsible for oxidation of tea leaf which causes tea leaf to turn black. Duration of oxidation determines which types of oolong or black tea you end up with. For green tea you do not want any oxidation so you stop oxidation at very early stage (or kill the green).

Initial heating process is very crucial in setting aroma in green tea. Too little heating can create uneven heating thus partially oxidized leaves while too much heating will lose the fresh green aroma and occasionally add burned taste to your tea. It is this subtle balance of initial heating that creates excellent aroma.

How can you tell? It takes a bit of experience, but once you know how it should taste, then it is easier to detect the bad ones.

Rolling
Rolling of tea leaf allows tea to gain deeper flavor. Although it sounds simple to roll the leaf, but it takes back breaking hard work. Knowing the exact timing of rolling and softness of the leaf requires some experience. Rolling also evenly distribute moisture content of the leaf and prevents premature partial drying of tea leaf which generally leads to burns and powders.

Drying
Drying tea leaf is much more complex than just removing moisture out of leaf. It has different moisture levels at different areas of tea leaf and drying process has to remove the moisture evenly from the leaves. Uneven drying generally causes tea to taste like old rug or not fresh tasting.

Further understanding green tea processing gives me more room to experiment how to improve our green tea processing and also to learn the unique characteristics of tea in types of harvest, weather conditions, tea varieties, and even in what goes in the soil.

[back to Hamakua Artisan Farms]