How Chinese White Tea is Made (Fu Ding, China)

so this is probably just past 5 30 in the morning it's raining uh raining it's a good thing here because uh the old variety the local variety called the bencha will start budding when it starts to rain but of course all the farmers will have to waste a day because you can't really pick the tape uh the tea when it's raining so this is on my way by the way my boat is leaving at six so this is on my way to uh the boat and this is a facility lower part in the village that people are selling tea the rain is getting heavier and heavier uh and without umbrella uh everyone seems confused which one's the boat that leaves because most people told me they actually never uh took a boat to leave here before some did but they were saying like all these boats uh they take random turns to leave but they all seem to know when they leave this one they said it's most likely the one that will leave uh see all the chairs in here there's no one here yet i don't know actually i was wrong this is not the boat to go i mean the boat to go is over there this is where people are actually trading the tea this is a tea trading facility just uh the same as what we saw earlier with the house this lady just walked out with a little batch of uh bancha that he she wasn't able to sell so she's going back there's two more facilities like the one we passed by the the clex teas so the confusion is finally cleared uh this is the boat i will be leaving with likely two other people also leaving you see some of the tea even though it came out to a fat cake uh but uh there's the i was traveling on this water all by myself it was so cool i still remember it was one of the best moments of my life i was just sitting on the back of the whole lake was empty a little way those teas that's right by the water is usually not preferred so similar item tea for example right by the water and that's not preferred even though these are islands but remember how how in the qi mountain how we saw how tall the mountains are we actually uh rode in the mountains a motorcycle for over 40 minutes so these are like little hills it's not as preferred as the high mountains there's still high mountains you know the thing even on islands same thing with the or the islands that we get our keys from the renowned ones for example like the the monkey tip or like the lishi tip that our package came from they're all very high mountain islands it's pretty cool uh because it's a village i think everyone knows everybody they're really so we're now at the panxi this is the higher up from dian tou bamboo shooting up everywhere and people are see it's probably familiar looking now the the the leaf or the bud are bigger there's a really pretty lake down there and then there are people picking the tea it's very wet and slippery everywhere so i have to be careful so now it's a later plug you can see the uh the leaves mostly have opened up already hey much bigger now it's basically kind of like this um so you can see the bud become uh uh become skinnier and then uh with three leaves so this is basically uh now that this is the very popular new variety called fuyu number six the new variety uh it doesn't taste as good it's very light uh it looks much much prettier though uh and over here where you're plugging this is the uh the big white which is uh disputedly probably the the original variety of fooding but some say it's the other like a little uh white that's the real variety so we don't know but this is a much older variety and you can see just as we saw with a lot of other ones because this one has much more history it's darker the older leaves right and then over here it's much lighter so you can see these uh uh a big leaf already trying to find a because these are younger tea trees try to find a fully grown leaf like this one see how big the leaf is ah here's my hand you can see in comparison and now here we spot a couple bushes of the smaller leaves uh one and two uh this you can see the leaf it's just in comparison to size if you want to reference so these are some of the wild tea trees you see it's actually a whole bunch of them because they're we call them wild tea trees but really they're just unmaintained tea trees uh versus over here are maintained here so cultivator variety but you can see it just kind of grows wildly uh but because the planting the density is too high see the trunk doesn't even grow to the proper size but yet um from the growth the height and then the size of the leaf you know there's still a big leaf variety so here we're actually lost in the woods while looking for a tea garden i saw last i mean not last year several years ago actually i want to see how those tea trees have grown already but surprise surprise here um we actually found a really old wild tea tree you can tell from the trunk and there's always this dispute whether it's a what they call the little white or the big white um maybe the confusion resides with the name versus the actual variety um i'm pretty certain by looking at the leaves it's not really a small leaf variety but it's not really a big leaf variety either um and then the locals are saying this is definitely a xiao bai so but for for it to grow you can see i mean i know it's not a really you can compare with my waist it's about the same size even though this is definitely not the same size of trunk that we see with poor trees but in this area this is already the biggest largest those things it's actually quite a quite a mighty finding and then also uh right here we see a big rock so we got lost we thought there was a road but the road ends with the rock uh locals actually set up some kind of worshipping shrine here um this is a buddhism area um but i don't think they're really worshipping uh buddha in this cave so it's also kind of like a interesting mystery so we're gonna pick some and then take it home to see how it tastes so uh this is mr may his uh grandfather uh started this household and uh his family is the most well-known tea maker here um so he was explaining that uh usually they uh so so it has to be very dim fire to uh bake white tea so traditionally there is a i don't know if you any of you recall that i spoke of this in a tea house the traditional white tea does get baked dry um many many people actually i would say majority of the white tea now don't do that anymore it's almost a technique that's that's standardly lost um now when i bake the tea the fire has to be very very dim because they bake the tea for over an hour and they can't turn the tea because if any of the dust goes into uh the um the ashes it'll actually burn and then smoke the tea but you don't want smoke so they have to be very careful baking the tea and make it very dim sometimes if if they're uh they see the fire is a little too high the time is pressing they'll have to cover the fire a little bit uh to the charcoal ash a little bit and then they'll bake the tea on two different levels and then they just shift the level without actually uh turning the tea oh that's where the confusion was there's no two layers so together they have to bake the tea for like an hour uh and what they do is so they can flip the tea while the tea uh while the bamboo tray is actually on top of the charcoal so they will actually take this off and then flip the tea and then put it back onto the charcoal so the tea gets baked on both sides um it usually takes an hour but it's just basically until the tea is dry um so um the technique for white tea is is largely involved just basically sun drying the tea so what happens is of course they put it on the the big flat bamboo tray and then they put it outside to sun dry it and then they'll take it inside while the tea still absorb all the heat from the sun they'll just pile it up a little bit it's not the same kind of piling up like black tea which is a big pile it's just kind of like a little group of piles and then uh and if it's baking baking the tea they just basically take it inside and then bake it but if it's gonna get sun-dried straight actually a lot of people now prefer just the sun-dried one if it's the sun-dried tea what happens is basically they just take it out instead of baking the tea they take it out and sun-dry it again and dry it until it's dry basically what happened here is we're basically doing a rescue mission because so like i was explaining before white tea is really simple it's just it's almost like boring to to explain the process because you just you just have to lay it out under the sun and and let it dry basically but the tricky part is you can't that you have to you can't control the sun but yeah you have to control the temperature see what i'm saying the rescue mission is see how the tea has gone red and this is when the the temperature is too high the sun is too strong so even though it's good sun but you can't have the sun too hot preferred is above 18 degrees celsius but below 25 degrees celsius so if it's reached i mean we can't feel that temperature now because remember this is the true origin so when the tea is in peak season it's actually still kind of cold see our attire i'm actually wearing a jacket but we're talking about the the sun i guess the the the sun the temperature that reached the tea so if it's 20 so now it's about 28 degrees celsius so oftentimes what they had to do is they had to collect the tea once it's around noon time and then put it away so here i want to demo to you the different varieties or locations of white tea i know they all almost look the same we have some silver needles and white peas both here so let's see so this one this one is the original white tea in the footing area called dabai now this is also a dabai but it comes from the fuan or zhenghe area so you can see it's a little greener this is actually silver needle not white peony but it looks much greener and then these two are both white peonies and this one the little darker one so you can see this is also a local dabai variety of white peony versus this one so you can see the even though this is a white peony which has leaves but if you look at the color hue of the white part the hair is very similar now let's see if the light is good i think you can still tell that this one is whiter than this one now this is a new variety or you can call it lap variety but this one actually has some history it's a it's an old lap variety it's called the fuan number six and this one actually used to be used to make a lot of the red tea in this area whenever you see a red tea that the the color of the the bud is extra golden it's due to this very white hair of course the most desired is the original dabai variety but this is also there you can also see a lot of this in this area now this one this kind of very rough looking i don't know if you can tell when you touch it it's a little hard this is a yunnan red this is the moonlight white which is i would say the least desired white so i don't remember how many of you recall i was telling you that remember i was saying that so out of the six variety of teas basically three adopts the same kind of making method it's a green tea yellow tea and white tea or brewed using glasses but white tea in the recent years switched to the gaiwan system this also shows just the big leaf variety how flexible it is remember for poor tea you can boil you can brew with a gaiwan brew with a kettle with teapot it doesn't really matter that much so for big leaf variety it's just basically really robust and you can do in many ways but for cedar needle some still some people when they test the tea they rather do it in two systems especially for earlier plugs several needles sometimes the tea will flow up and down and all stand up so this one you can see it's already a little flat but it'll stand eventually but for the very very early plug it'll stand sooner but for for example like a white peony or gongmei or shoumei wouldn't stand so it wouldn't matter if you use a gaiwan or a glass but just let you know that there are two different systems