Processing pu-erh tea with a kill-green machine

Hi everybody. As we're closing in towards the end of the spring harvest, we've had massive sprouts everywhere in the tea gardens, and it means that we've had to collect a lot of fresh leaves recently. So much that we don't have time to process them by hand, in the wok. So today we're going to do the cooking on this, what we call a shaqing ji, a shaqing machine. So a machine that's designed to cook the tea and, well, do the kill green. So make it into shaqing, deactivate the enzymes, etc. So let's not waste any time. I've preheated the inside of this tumbler to 300 degrees Celsius. And let's not wait. It's time to first put the leaves. So I'm going to increase the revolution rate. I have that potentiometer here. It's fast at the beginning, so that the leaves enter easily and they don't get burned. We're at 292 degrees inside, so it's time to start. So now I'm putting about 50 kilos of leaves. So it's six times as much as I would do in a wok processing. In a minute I'll tell you more about why I do this. Let me just finish. Okay, so let me just get a bit closer to the microphone. I hope you're hearing me a bit better. Sorry for the background noise. This is not a jet engine turbine. There's a lot of friction. It's not very optimized, very well adjusted. So that's why it makes this noise as soon as it starts revolving a bit fast. I just want to keep that revolution rate for now. If you allow it, I will just bring the camera forward. I'd like you to see what's going on inside the tumbler. Okay, I hope you can see a bit more clearly here. My hands are free. I will take the microphone in my hand. I hope that will make a bit less noise. So you can see that right now we need... Well, I try to imitate what we do with the hand processing. Which means our processing method that we like is start at high temperature. Then when the leaves shrink, we just lower the temperature. And we do a slower shatching. Because you have lower temperature, you can allow yourself to flip the leaves a bit slower. Now I guess it's about time to lower the speed a little. At this time, the leaves are not at risk of burning because steam has built up in the batch. Let me check the temperature. So now we're at about 200 degrees inside. So it's not that hot. Maybe you can read that here. I'm not sure. And that's normal because I don't have a very strong fire. We could increase the strength of the fire, but actually it's not needed. So I would say the main difference with the hand processing is that in this machine the temperature can be a bit harder to control. You get a less direct feedback on the leaves. And it's harder to see what's going on inside the machine. So to know what's going on inside, I've got a little bamboo stuff that I put here. And I'll try to grab a few leaves. And hopefully you can see what they look like. So you can see that right now they are very green. There's a bit of experience to get as well because in any way how you process it they will not look like the way they do in a wok processing. So you have to get used to the difference. Now I like to do that at a fairly low temperature. Now the inside is at 200 degrees. Maybe I should have added a bit more fire. I don't want the stuff to get too cold. So I'm going to add the ventilation. I'm going to ventilate the oven where the wood is burning. And that will help increase the temperature because we'll have bigger flames. So that's one possibility that we have with this machine. Here you can hear it ventilating right now. Maybe I can show you what the fire looks like. And then we'll reposition the camera. So let me just let you have a look at the machine in its entirety. So this is a very rough looking machine. You can see there's a chimney at the top. Right now the ventilation that's going on is this stuff. A simple fan that blows air into the combustion chamber. So you can see that now we're having a fairly small fire. But there's a lot of embers in it. It's quite evenly spread. It took me a bit of time to set up the video shooting stuff. So I let a lot of the wood burn. And that's why we started at 300 degrees. But now that we've put the leaves in, we don't have as high a temperature. So this is the back of the machine. And you can see actually the... Sorry. If there's no steam, you can actually see the tea tumbling inside. And at the back of the machine you have another blower. Which will allow you to dissipate any steam that you don't want. Any excess of steam that you don't want to have. Handy, we also have a thing, it's called a power plug. That allows you to run the machine with a tractor, for example. So even if you have a power cut, for example, you can still run the machine. And just here is our wok. And we're going to fry, we're going to cook some leaves today. That's why I'm just doing the... I'm just doing the shangtai right now from the natural tea gardens. From Eau d'Oeuf. You can see that's the batch I just made. So you have slightly different looking leaves. But I'm pretty happy with that first batch. We managed to get them quite in the same way. As we like when we do the wok cooking. So let's have a look again at these leaves. And here maybe we can get a slightly better angle actually. So it's very cool to make videos by day. Because you can see everything. And it's also nice to make tea by day. But just be aware that tea doesn't look the same by day. So you might be used to having a certain color. And you won't get the same during the day. Just because the light is different. So right now, let's have a look. So I can see there's a bit too much cooking. I think it's time to turn off the lower fan. That will be much quieter. We can have a look again at the temperature inside. It's been fairly stable. About 200 degrees. I think at this point you can see that the tea is getting moist. I want to have the stuff revolve even slower. Actually as slow as possible. It makes the room more quiet. And I just feel that the tea actually cooks better. You know that we like a lot of steaming in our tea. And having the tumbler revolve slow, slowly. Allows for that steam to build up in the bunch of leaves. So maybe I can just lend a hand to this tea. It's always great to touch the tea by yourself. You can learn a lot about tea just by looking at the leaves. Smelling and getting a feel for the texture of the tea. Now at this point we've been cooking for maybe about 10 minutes. A bit more maybe. It's definitely not enough. It's definitely not well cooked enough. We're going to keep having this tea turn slowly. And even more slowly right now. Actually as long as the tea doesn't burn. There's no point in flipping it. So when I'm doing the machine processing. Instead of following the recommendations of the builder of these machines. Actually you have a kind of full automatic mode. Which will directly control the strength of the fire. Depending on the inner temperature. But I found this fully automatic mode not to give the result that I wanted with our tea. So what I do instead is I check the temperature from an external device. We're now at 190. I check the temperature from an external device. And I make my own decisions. So I kind of started the machine reluctantly. But seeing how much tea we had to make today. I just felt it was better to do a good job with the machine than to do... I don't know why the machine stops here. Just give it another minute to be slow again. Maybe I just set it up too slow. And the engine couldn't fight the friction of the machine. So I said that today I prefer to do a good job with the machine. Than a poor job with the wok. Because that's often what happens. No matter how much we love the tea. If you have like 10 hours straight of processing. Of course towards the end you won't do as good a job as you could. Because of tiredness. So in this case it's fine. Because if I use the machine actually it's not a lot of tea for the machine. I think today we have about 200 kilos of tea. This is our last day of tea making today. And I think, well I hope we will get this tea right. So 200 kilos I will process about 50 to 70 kilos by hand in the wok. And I did the rest on the machine. So that was only two batches. So it's fine to just do two batches. As you can see it's not as tiring as if I had to process the tea by hand. So let's have another check on the tea. So you can see that since the last time we took it. It's turned slightly more yellow. But again it's definitely not enough. Well this method will be fairly simple. As you can see I started with high temperature, high revolution. Until the leaves would shrink, until more steam would build up. And now I want to take it as slow as possible in the machine. So maybe we can zoom in. So that you can get a better impression of those teas. Let me just fix the tripod. Yes I think here you get a slightly better view. And well the problem is if I manage to make good tea with the machine. I will be a bit sad as well. Because wouldn't it mean that all that work behind the wok is kind of wasted time. Because I could as well use the machine. I still believe that you get a better control with the wok. Just because you get a much more straightforward feedback on the leaves. You touch the leaves every time you flip them. You can smell the leaves. While here even though I can access the leaves. I'm not really inside. So it's harder for me to feel the heat and stuff. And also when you are doing the shaqing by hand. You're kind of pressing the leaves. Giving them a kind of rolling at the same time. Which explains why their shape will look different. Here you will see that when we take these off the tumbler. They look very much like... They look very much... Well they look different. They look like there's much less rolling. They are less tightly packed. They are looser than when it's made in the wok. So when it comes to production capacity. I told you that here I put the equivalent of 8 batches. I would say it depends 6 to 8 batches. Depending on how you like to do it by hand. And it will take the same time to cook. So obviously this is a much faster way of making tea. Also much less tiring. Actually all of the work is just carrying leaves around. There's less of a human component. There's less hard work behind making this tea. But at least what we shouldn't take away is the monitoring of the tea. And that's why I stay around and check. And try to have as much of a control as I can on the leaves. So you can see now. This is what our leaves look like. Getting even more yellow. Actually I don't want to change anything now. And I will keep the steam in. And that's also why I put quite a lot of leaves in this batch. The more leaves you put. The more steam will accumulate inside this tumbler. Maybe we can change the speed just quickly. And come back to the original speed. You can see that at different speed. The leaves will flip in different ways. So that's quite interesting. But right now. By doing this I kind of imitate the hand processing. In which usually you make a ball at the end. And you want to keep the steam inside. But maybe every minute or so. You want to release the steam from the batch. Otherwise you really might have too much steaming. So that's what I do here. And I just try. But I must say that I feel like I'm not experienced enough with the machine processing. Because we don't even use it every year. I think we didn't use it last year actually. And now we can see that the tea is starting to get dry. But there's still plenty of time. I would say we'll keep it for 5 more minutes. Even watching the tea tumbling is quite interesting. And then it's important to smell. Yeah, you get that good fragrance. So even though the tea is in a machine. I try to keep it as close as possible to me. So that I can have the control over it. And the technique that I use for machine shatching. Is very different from what the neighbors do. I've seen no one using that low temperature and slow revolution option. Let's check the temperature again. Oh, it's 116 now. So it's very very cold I would say. So I will need to add some wood. Yeah, right now we're kind of running out of wood in the combustion chamber. But it's no problem actually. Well, this is something I understood this year. I always thought that it was too hard to control the temperature. Because the walls were too thick. But when you check with the infrared thermometer. If you plan your fire well. It's not too hard actually. It seems that after all the walls are not that thick. And therefore actually do the method I like with that machine. And there is actually an even better machine. That you can get. A friend of mine, well several friends of mine got it. It's a small machine. That's supposed to imitate hand processing perfectly. I have yet to taste the result. Because it's quite a new machine. So people mostly got it last year. Ah yeah, we got the good fragrance now coming. So even though the leaves really don't look like the hand processing. You kind of get the similar smell here. So you can see when they get sticky like this. It's usually a good sign that they are on the point of being cooked. You can also try twisting like this. And see if they are trying to break the stems. See if they break. You can see that despite being quite big. This one doesn't break. So you can have a look at this tea. We can check maybe the stems. Like big stems like this. You can see that big stems still break. Which means that it's an indicator that the Sha Qing is written complete. Yet you have to test this I think on several stems. And generally you just want to check that the leaves should be sticky when you press them like this. So you could say that this batch is ready now. I just want to give it two more minutes maybe. And that will give me enough time to reposition the camera maybe. And then we will extract the leaves. But I don't want to extract them until they start getting dry. So remember you should never let the leaves go dry inside the wok or the machine. Otherwise you will have greenish poor tea. But you can cook it as long as possible. In my opinion the longer you cook the better as long as they don't get dry. And you can listen to the sound. As the leaves get dry you will get a higher pitch when they hit the bottom of the tumbler. So that's also a cue that will let you know when you should take the leaves out. So maybe it's about time to take these leaves out. Maybe we can position it like this. And then I will just invert. Let me just take the camera by hand. So you can see that we have our leaves inside now. And we're going to take them out. For this we need to invert the rotation direction of this machine. So that's what I'm going to do. Let me just... And so here we are. We have our batch of leaves. Our last batch of poor tea cooked. And I want to give it an extra steaming. So I'm going to let it in a pile just like this for a couple of minutes. And then I will lay it on that bamboo mat. While this batch is now ready for rolling. So we're going to put that in this machine. And we're going to roll it. And I'm going to leave you here. I think there are lots of thoughts we could have on machine processed tea. And maybe I will talk about it in other videos. I'd also like to present you some different types of machines. So remember that this machine can do the job of about 6 to 8 workers who work by hand. For the same time. And I would say less tiring for the workers operating the machine. So that's it. Here is our tea. Thank you for watching. And see you later. Bye bye.