What makes autumn tea special？

Hello there, today I'm in Jingmai Mountain, and we're in early autumn, and this is the second day we're making tea today. So this is a bash of gushu, there's about 10 kg of gushu, of ancient tea, in that basket, and we're going to process it. So you can see that we're in the morning now, originally I wanted to process this tea yesterday evening, but in the afternoon we had rain, it's been sunny so far, so it was quite nice, and we got a heavy shower in the afternoon yesterday, and that cooled down the temperature, and the effect is that if you have lower temperature, your weathering will be much slower, especially if the air is more humid due to the rain. So then I decided to wait until the next day to process this tea, because as you know, if there's not enough weathering, you will have more astringency in the tea, and it will just be hard to cook without burning, because the leaves are quite swollen, and the purpose of weathering is to let the leaves loosen and become a bit more flexible. OK, so I left the wok for a bit too long now, so when I put the leaves in, I think we were at like 340 degrees Celsius, which is a bit high, so I need to keep flipping those leaves quite fast. Note that the initial temperature is not so important, because very quickly, as water evaporates, the temperature stabilizes to a lower amount, you can imagine this because of heat transfers, but I don't want to go into too much detail today about this, I already made a video about the physics of that cooking. So today I'd like to talk a bit about the difference between autumn and spring tea, because most of the times, well, we hear about spring tea, and I take a lot of pictures and videos when it's spring, and a bit less so during autumn. So here is the opportunity to equalize a bit. I think autumn tea is a bit of a forgotten season, or something like that, because, well, you can have really good tea, really fine tea in autumn, but usually people hold spring in higher esteem than autumn, and, well, while I would agree overall, you know, I think it's still a shame, because you can really have great tea in autumn, especially if you like aromatic teas, I found that autumn tea always has a special fragrance that spring tea doesn't have. Of course, you have fragrance in spring tea, but it is of another nature, I would say. It's quite hard for me to describe the fragrances, really, because I think if I tell you it's flowery or fruity, I think actually it doesn't help much, and I think I want to drop the fragrance description overall, because it doesn't provide much information, I think fragrance has to be experienced, but if you compare side by side an autumn tea with a spring tea of the same area, especially if they are quite new, you will notice a major difference in fragrance, not so much in terms of power than in terms of character of nature. Now, of course, autumn tea tends to be a bit weaker than spring tea, and this is because, well, autumn tea is the end of the line for the tea tree, it's the end of that marathon that it has to do every year. It's been producing leaves for maybe eight months, six to eight months so far. Let's say it starts producing tea in February or March, and now we're in September, so of course you've had maybe four to six flushes already in Chiang Mai. If you were in a more intensive plantation, you could have over 10 flushes, so it means that the tea trees would have sprouted leaves over 10 times, and so that has an impact. I guess it's just a part of the genetics too, like the tea tree is programmed to put different chemicals in the leaves depending on the stage of the year, probably as a strategy to protect against insects. So yeah, there's one line of thinking that says like autumn tea is weaker because it's the end of the season and the tea tree is a bit tired, and there's another line of thinking that says it's entirely genetic. The tea tree is programmed to produce different flavors at different seasons, and this is in order to protect from different insects along the year. Maybe I will cover these different theories in more detail in a future video, but while you're having tea, you can ask yourself why does the tea have a fragrance like this, and why is it so different depending on the season, depending on the areas of production, even depending on the years. Okay, so now I'd like to talk more about the difference between spring and autumn from a practical standpoint as a tea producer. So first, you have much less tea to make during the autumn season. The flushes are much more separated than during the spring. It could be due to some kind of genetic programming that makes all the spring tea sprout at the same time, only separated by a gradient of altitude and maybe tree age, but within like a two-week time frame, all of your tea trees will have sprouted in early spring. So you get these sudden waves of fresh tea leaves to process, and it can kind of strand our production facilities, because early spring is usually the only time when you operate at maximum capability in your processing unit. Now in autumn, it's a bit different. You also have some waves, but they seem to be a bit more random. It could be due to the time that happens. Maybe they start well metered, you know, the tea trees start well metered at the beginning of the season, of the growing season, and then you could imagine that, let's say you're in a race at the beginning of the race, like all the cars are together, and the more time goes, and the more they are separated, depending on other factors. And this could be the case for the tea trees, you know, they are maybe not regulated all throughout the season, and this is why, well, at the second flush you will have a bit more distance, depending on the tea gardens, and the third flush even more distance, and in the end, yeah, I would say it really depends on the gardens now, but we get a much more, how to say that, in autumn we can say that we can process a little bit of tea all throughout the two months of the autumn season, while in spring that will be more like two waves of intense work, and not much between each wave, okay. Now also, while in spring we're going from, if you start spring early, you will start very slow, like you won't have a lot of tea, and then the tea will sprout suddenly, and then of course you'll have more and more work until the rain comes, at which point you can consider it like late spring tea, and quality will be different. So usually in spring you go from less work to more work as the season goes, and it's kind of the opposite for autumn tea, because most of the tea will sprout in September, and then the sprouting rate, the way that the tea trees sprout everywhere in Chiang Mai, well it kind of slows down as we approach the winter, as the temperatures get lower, so you'll have most of the autumn tea produced in September and early October, and then in late October and November you'll get just a little bit, and the more you go, the more you'll have huang pian, the more you'll have yellow flakes in the tea, because it's probably related to temperature and again growth, the genetics and growth cycle. In autumn the leaves, they grow older on the tea trees, like when they grow they seem already mature, they're not like the spring leaves, where during spring it's like you have babies growing everywhere, like they're very tender, and they remain tender for many days, while in autumn it seems that as they grow they look already thicker and rougher than in spring. And here comes my point, it comes to processing, that the processing in autumn is different from the processing in spring. I would say spring tea is the easiest to process, I'm talking about Pu'er tea for the Sha Qing. Spring tea is easier to process because it's very forgivable, like you get plenty of water in the leaves and they are very tender, they won't burn easily, you won't get that many yellow flakes, and so you have a larger margin of error compared to autumn tea. Now in autumn tea it really depends, sometimes they have a lot of water inside and sometimes they don't have water at all, you have a larger diversity I would say of leaves, and I would say most of the time when you make good autumn tea they tend to lack of water, and it means that you need to save the water in the leaves. How do you save the water? You don't let it evaporate, if I do like this you can see all that water flying away. Now if I make a bowl like this, then I try to conserve the steam inside the tea leaves so that they keep cooking the tea. If I lose too much water I will have to stop the Sha Qing, otherwise my leaves will burn, but if I stop too early of course my leaves won't be cooked. If I lack of water I don't have a choice, I have to remove the leaves, and my leaves will turn red because they won't be cooked enough. So I have to save a lot of water in the tea leaves, especially during the autumn, when you have those very mature leaves with few water in it. Now the problem is the more you cook your leaves in autumn, the more Huang Tian you get, the more yellow flakes you get, because yellow flakes they are produced when most of the water is extracted from the leaves, and it turns into a kind of popcorn or something like that. The structure of the leaf changes and it's kind of fried or something. Now of course the longer you cook the tea in autumn, the more Huang Tian you will get, so many people in order to avoid having too much yellow flakes, Huang Tian in their tea, they will cook it less than in spring, and it will turn into a redder tea, because there won't be enough Sha Qing to deactivate the enzymes. And that's why a lot of the autumn tea that you will get will be a bit redder than in spring. I think it's mostly related to a choice made by the farmer, to limit the amount of yellow flakes he gets. Because of course, well, the leaves are cheaper, the fresh leaves are cheaper in autumn, but you get a lot more yellow flakes to sort, like in a typical Gu Shu batch like this, we'll get well half of the weight of that tea, will have to be sorted out, because it's yellow flakes, and we'll have to sell it separately. So of course you have to take this into account when you price your teas. And so of course to kind of save on some losses by Huang Tian, it can be worth it for the farmers to process the tea a bit less, to have less Huang Tian and therefore make more money on the tea. But it will also give a different quality, a more redder tea. Redder tea can be good, I think, for young tea. Some people actually prefer red and young tea, and it's also a style, a style that is made consciously by the farmers, because that's what their customers want. But I would say for the long-term storage and to keep the overall power in the tea, the good bites you get, and the hui gan, and the sweetness and everything, I think it's still better to process it more on the green side, to process it like it should be. I think this tea is quite pleasant to process, there's enough water inside. We've been back for less than a week in Mai, and there are a few festivals these days. It's the time of the year when people do offerings to Buddha, so basically they throw a huge party in their home and invite the whole village, and it's like a splurge for Buddha. So people are quite busy doing all this stuff, so we don't have that much tea available right now, but I hope next week we'll be able to produce more. Today I only have two batches to process, so it's quite easy work. And so I process this tea in the morning because of that withering issue, and also usually if you process on the second day in the morning, you will get a slightly less astringent tea. So for autumn tea, I would say I prefer to process in the morning generally, and most of the time I would say I don't have a choice because there's not enough withering in the evening because of temperatures. So now it's been about 15 minutes that I've started this batch, and well you can see it's turning very nice. So autumn tea is more yellow than spring tea. You won't really have that dark green color in autumn tea. When it grows it's more yellowish, and actually it can be much harder to make the difference between ancient tea trees and young trees between Gusu and Shanghai. During the autumn when you're buying the fresh leaves, they look almost identical, while in spring there's a stark contrast. But it's okay because we're working with people we trust, you know, relatives and things, and anyway I like to have a tour in the gardens during the day and see what's going on. So these leaves come from Aiban. You can see that on farmer leaf we've released two cakes actually that come from Aiban. There's one called Jingmai Aiban, and another is the Jingmai Single Tree. It's made of the big trees of Aiban Gardens. So it's a garden that I like very much. There's a great vibe there and a lot of big trees, large biodiversity, and so yeah two days ago I just went there and saw that their trees had sprouted, and so yesterday I could get their leaves. That was pretty nice of them. So now I have put out the fire. I've put out most of the fire, and we're having a slow ending to this session. In autumn I like to give it a longer time than in spring. It's not a problem I think in autumn to go almost 30 minutes, maybe 25. And usually in spring I do 20 minutes per batch, but in autumn I will do maybe 25 to 30 minutes. Of course it depends on how much tea you put, things like that, but what matters most is looking at the leaves, touching the leaves. You can feel, even through the gloves, I can feel the moisture in the leaves, and so I think they can go a bit more. And when you listen to this, when you listen to this pitch, like the sound of the leaves against the wok, you can hear a different pitch. It's a higher and higher pitch as the tea gets dry, and that's also a hint. You can use this as a reference to feel, to get a feel of how dry your tea is. So I will finish the processing this batch slowly. I think we can still give it at least five minutes on low fire, and I will leave you here and stay with my tea leaves, take good care of them. I hope you're nice and safe at home and having great tea, and see you later for another video. Bye-bye.