High Mountain Oolong: the most insane tea ever made

It's a cloudy afternoon in Ailao Mountain. The tea pickers are just back from the fields. We're in late May, in the middle of the spring harvest at Mr. Huang's oolong tea plantation. Mr. Huang takes a look at today's harvest. We'll be able to make delicious tea. Let's see how this oolong tea is made. First, the leaves are spread on the top floor, in a greenhouse. They need to be exposed to the sun for a brief period. We don't necessarily want direct exposure to the sun though. This is why there's a shading net on the ceiling. Today is cloudy. The sun wilting should take about an hour. Sunlight will allow the leaves to soften quickly. Mr. Huang doesn't get to sleep much during the harvest, as it requires a 24-7 presence. He likes to oversee each step of the process. We've got beautiful leaves today. The leaves are moved downstairs. No need to pack them. Gravity will help us on this one. This is a typical Taiwanese factory design. That saves a lot of time. We spread them on flatbed baskets. They will wither for a couple of hours inside the factory. You need to get the thickness right, as it determines the speed at which the tea withers. Some of their water will evaporate, allowing them to soften further. It takes about 8 hours. They are shuffled a couple of times during the process, to ensure homogeneous withering. There's about 200 baskets worth of leaves today. That's a lot of tea to shuffle, and requires a permanent presence from the workers. Again, Mr. Huang inspects the leaves. The smell tells you when they are ready. We'll wait a bit more, and go drink tea in the meanwhile. Mr. Huang shows us how soft the leaves have turned during this process. You see how the stem bends now? This loss of turgescence is crucial to make the next step work. The leaves are put in a big tumbler for the next step, shaking. It's a simple machine, in which the leaves go up and down. Each time they fall, small bruises are created, especially on the sides of the leaves. This speeds up the oxidation process. It only lasts a couple of minutes. You don't want too much bruising. Just enough to bring out the best flavor out of the leaves. To complete this step, a second machine is used, with a similar purpose. It is used at the end of the shaking step, to also loosen the leaves and give them a better shape. Now that the leaves are bruised, they need some time to oxidize. We'll leave them in this room, under controlled temperature and humidity. Let's come back in a few hours. We want to make a high mountain oolong with low oxidation. You can now see red patches on the leaves. This is about right. The smell has changed a lot. We need to heat them up to destroy the enzymes causing the oxidation. Let's throw the leaves in. It's time to stop the oxidation. For that, we use a cooking machine, a tumbler heated up by gas. 300°C for 10 minutes. That will ensure the tea does not oxidize further. You need to keep a close eye on the leaves cooking, and make some tiny adjustments to get just the right amount of cooking. We don't want them to burn. The factory manager says they are ready. Let's take them out. The leaves come out very moist. We don't want that water to evaporate away. You'll understand why soon. Good tea processing is all about the small details. The leaves are stored in a plastic bag and left to cool down for a short time. The fragrance in the factory is amazing. After a few minutes, they are taken out of the bag with their moisture recaptured. We put them into a funny-looking machine. It's rolling time. The leaves are knitted gently over the machine wall. It squeezes the juices out of the leaves, allowing for a stronger and quicker brew in the final product. This machine also gives a basic shape to the tea. Making good tea is all about paying attention and keeping close contact with the leaves. Even for teas that require a lot of machines, the tea maker has a crucial role. On each day, the tea comes with a different size of leaves and texture. You have to adapt to it. You can't rely on established parameters and call it a day. Again, Mr. Huang controls the smell and texture of the tea. It allows him to make adjustments in the processing. The leaves are left to rest for a while. At this point, you could directly dry the tea and drink it, but you'd find it quite bitter. We need an extra step to make it softer and more enjoyable, and this will take us a whole day, and I do mean 24 hours. This is really what makes high-mountain oolong so labor-intensive. No other tea has such a long and complex processing. You don't see that step in any other kind of tea. The leaves are put into a large piece of cloth. which is tightened to make a big tea ball. The ball is tightened extremely hard to achieve the desired effect. The bunch of leaves is placed in yet another machine that will add pressure on the ball and shape the leaves inside into pearls. The leaves are then taken out of the machine and loosened, first in a tumbler, and then by hand. As you can see, they don't look like pearls yet. That's because we only did that once. We need to repeat that process five times. But we have another problem here. If the leaves are too hard, they will get crushed. We need to keep them flexible. Remember when I said it was important to keep their moisture in? That's where it comes into play, along with temperature. The leaves need to be reheated before each step to give them more flexibility. But reheating will also get them dry, so we're working on a tiny thread here. Too much reheating, and the leaves will dry out before having taken their final shape. Not enough, and the leaves won't have good flexibility, and will get crushed in the machine. During the five repeats of this step, the leaves dry progressively while taking their pearl shape. Their tasting profile will change, and you'll end up with a fragrant tea without too much bitterness. And there we go, doing that shaping process from sunset to sunrise, and even later. Mr. Huang has three teams of workers that relay each other. It is intense work that occurs for ten days twice a year. Next time you drink a cup of fine oolong tea, dedicate a sip to their hard work. It took two days of work to get these leaves into their final shape. Finally, in the middle of the night, the leaves are dried slowly in the machine. You can give them some amount of roast by playing with the temperature of the dryer. Today, we'll go for 90 degrees Celsius, and two hours of drying. The leaves come out slowly, and are laid on bamboo baskets for the last time before being vacuum sealed into their final packaging.