Making GABA Oolong Tea in Taiwan

Hey teaheads! This is Don from Mei Leaf. In this video, how to make GABA Oolong. Taiwanese GABA Oolong tea is one of our most popular Oolongs, much loved by our clients, so I thought I would take you here, in Taiwan, to show you how GABA Oolong is made. We're going to do a walk-through of this facility, where our producers are making Ruby GABA tea at the moment. Let's go. All right, so first of all, the tea leaves are picked, and then they are withered. You can see behind me here this shade-covered area. So they'll cover it. There's different layers of shading that they can put across here to control the sun, so they're working with the weather. They weigh the tea leaves before withering, and then they're trying to get 25 percent moisture reduction. So they're continuously weighing the leaves to make sure that they get 25 percent. In China, normally what they'll do is they'll bend the stalks to see when it's pliable. They do that as well, but they're a bit more accurate here. They'll measure the weight here so it's 25 percent less. They say the third leaf looks very, very soft. So they've got their visual cues, but essentially they're doing it through weighing. After the leaves have been withered they then come here for indoor withering. So they'll be piled up here. About 20 kilos of leaves will be piled up on each one of these baskets here, and they'll be left here for indoor withering. What's happening during indoor withering is more moisture is being released, but crucially, cell walls are breaking down. Therefore, chemical components in the leaves are mingling, mixing together, creating new flavor compounds, which is what we love. So the outdoor withering that happens, then the indoor withering that continues. It's going to continue to soften. When the producer feels that the right level of withering has been achieved, usually about two hours in here, then it will go into GABA-boosting mode. So what happens is that we've got some tanks outside. They'll take the leaves here, they'll put them in a bag, and they'll put them inside these tanks. They'll suck out all of the oxygen, so it becomes a vacuum in there, and they will leave the leaves in there for about eight hours. After eight hours they take the leaves out, and they put them in these drums here. So they'll load up these drums here, and then they'll set it on a spin, on a slow spin, for four hours. What's happening there is, again, they're agitating the leaves. They're breaking some of the cell walls. They're intentionally, in a controlled way, bringing the essential oils and the components in the leaf up to the surface to oxidize. They're also making sure that when they put the leaves back into the GABA tank, because they do this three times, that there's been enough movement in the leaves so that they get an even amount of processing. So after four hours here it goes back into the GABA tank another eight hours. After eight hours there it comes back here another four hours. After that it goes back for another eight hours. So there's three times in the oxygen-depleted tank, twice here being rolled. At that point the leaves are ready, in terms of their processing, to be fired, which means fixing the leaves. So that's the Sha Qing process. Come follow me. This is the stage that we're at now. So the Ruby tea was picked yesterday, and all of this was done yesterday. We can't film everything here, but this is good, because we get to smell the leaf. Now I'm going to hold my mic, because it's going to be very, very loud in here. Follow me. So you can see down here are the leaves after the GABA process. I'll stick my whole face in it, get a full whiff of it. Incredible. I'm getting camphor. I'm getting those medicinal notes coming through. A little bit of cinnamon, eucalyptus, but still retains some of the green elements. Now you can see the leaves here. It sort of looks very rough, and quite interesting, because you can see the pickings. So you can see the pickings that have happened here. We've got a bud, and about three leaves. A very small bud, so like three to four leaves here, and the color is this nice, auburn color. So these leaves now need fixing. We're going to go to the Sha Qing process here. Twenty kilos is loaded up here, and they go into these machines here. These are the classic spinning machines that are used in Taiwan. They're going to be running at about 300 degrees Celsius, and it's going to be about six minutes, six to seven minutes, of Sha Qing. The smell coming out of these machines is knockout. Toffee caramel. Amazing smell. Caramel, noisette note going on, but still you're getting this release of green coming through. So it's a combination. Imagine taking green apples and dipping it in really dark caramel. Incredible. After that, after this Sha Qing process, you can see it here, these leaves are nice and hot. They will be brought immediately to the rolling machine. Look at the texture of those leaves. They're still very flat, okay? What now needs to happen is this rolling stage where the outer layer of those leaves are stripped off. All of the leaves are gently crushed so that they don't break the leaves, but bring all of the essential oils, and bring all of the inner leaf material up to the surface. What that means is that when you brew you're going to have a nice, rich brew. If you don't do this process you're going to have to wait a long time for the water to enter the leaf. I'm going to hang about here, because I want to stick my nose in those. Actually, no. I don't have to do that. After the rolling it goes into this machine here. Chocolate caramel. A little bit of sort of burnt candy floss note. Really, really sweet. You can see the texture here of these leaves is completely different now. Now the leaves have been softened, or they look much colossal, much shinier, because of all those juices being brought to the surface. It will then go through this drying machine here. This drying machine, first of all, spins to make sure we get an even layer of leaves, and then it will go through this conveyor belt here, a very noisy conveyor belt of heating, until it comes out here. Now the key here is that the leaves need to be nearly dry, but not completely dry, because the next stage after this is turning these into those small balls that you buy. So the ball-rolling process requires there to be some moisture in the leaves, otherwise they will break. Let me stick my nose into this one. Incredible. Let's come through here. The smell of the leaves is carob. It's burnt coconut. So imagine very dark, roasted coconut. I'm getting pine. I'm getting eucalyptus, budgie notes going on, and still, as I said, a bit of eucalyptus and pine. But really, what springs to mind, the image that springs to my mind, is deep, roasted coconut. Imagine taking coconuts, putting them in the oven so they go brown. That deep, roasted coconut flavor. Okay. So, at this point they will leave the leaves to cool down. Then they'll go to the ball-rolling stage. The ball-rolling stage means putting the leaves in big bags. We're going to see if we can get some footage later. Okay, quick pause. I'm going to show you this rolling process, because it's worth you seeing it. In Taiwan they do it a little bit different to in China. So the leaves have cooled down. These are cool leaves, and so the first thing that happens is she needs to heat them up again. So she's putting them in that Sha Qing machine again for a couple of minutes at lower temperature, just to make sure that they become pliable. We don't want them to break. She's releasing a fresh batch there. She's going to load that into that nice, bright orange bucket. They're going to be nice and warm, and the orange bucket gets brought here to this high-tech machine. Now I've seen these block-making machines before, but never as high-tech as this. What this is doing is basically preparing the tea for ball-rolling. So it's compressing it, compressing it, using extreme pressure to compress the tea into a block, and then it goes into this machine. That then loosens it all. It then goes back into the compressor, gets compressed into a block, and they do that about 20 times. So they just keep doing that. What's happening is that they're just making the leaf more and more compact, more and more compact, so that when they go to the ball-rolling process it becomes easier for them to do. You can see here, inside here, a big block of leaves. Wow! Imagine throwing that into your Gai Wan. Ooh! Looking beautifully glossy there. Really glossy. That then gets brought up. I love it. All automated. I remember seeing this when I was in Taiwan about three or four years ago, when we were here. They weren't using these. They were manpower, picking up these blocks, throwing them back into one of these Sha Qing machines at no temperature, just to roll it. Because what's happening now is he's loosening it up. The leaves look a little bit like this. You can see it's already taken on a lot of that ball-rolled shape. So this is sort of pre-rolling. It's this tea here is actually not our Ruby. This is another Gaba which has been machine-picked, which is why it's got such large stalks. We have hand-picked tea, so you wouldn't have as many stalks as you have here. After that compressing stage, which as I said takes place about 20 times, it then moves over here to these machines. They will fill these bags up with the tea. They'll put one of these plastic rims at the bottom. They'll tighten up into a ball, and then they'll put it into this machine which spins, and spins, and spins, and they'll use metal rods, usually in China, but probably here it's different, to make sure it just keeps tightening the knot. Tightening it, tightening it, tightening it, and inside the leaves will just get more and more curled and roll up, and they'll usually do that five to six times until the ball-rolling stage is over. At that point the tea is not ready yet. It still needs to be roasted. So they will send their tea to a roaster, which is a totally different skill to this production facility. So the farmers are a different skill, this processing is a different skill, and then they'll send it to the roasters that will tweak it according to the client's needs. Normally roasting for Ruby Gaba, for us we've asked for it to be done three times, so it's a dark-roasted Oolong, three times at 10 hours each. So we roast our Ruby Gaba for 30 hours at about 90 to 105 degrees. There's a sort of ramping that happens. You start at 90 and move up to 105 degrees. At that point the tea is ready for your cup. So that's how you make a Gaba Oolong tea. I hope that that has given you a bit more insight, a bit more understanding, and hopefully a little bit more appreciation of all of the processes that it takes to make that delicious tea in your cup. That's it teaheads. Check out our other videos, taste our teas wherever you are in the world by browsing our website, or visit our teahouse in London. Other than that, I'm Don from Mei Li. Thank you for being a part of the revelation of true tea. Stay away from those tea bags, keep drinking the good stuff, and spread the word, because nobody deserves bad tea. Bye.