My computer will not let me put photos on this web page, so today there is no “featured image.” I’m sure when I can get a teenager over here , they will show me in a few seconds what I’m doing wrong.
Our tea farm is going wide open! We are making tea every day. We have picked over the field taking the first flush and first making green tea (a little yellow some call white) and as the leaves get older we make the black teas. The second flush is maturing nicely and coming on well. Without looking I would say we have made over a hundred pounds so far, our goal is 300. We usually make that but we just get tired of doing it some years and fall a little bit short of our 300 pound goal.
We are also doing tea tours almost every day. We offer 1:00 tours for $20 per person or drive-up five minute tours for free. On the scheduled tours you get a cup of fresh brew, a biochemistry glass on the difference between green and black teas and how they are made. Then we get on the golf cart and ride through the rows of thousands of tea bushes with a good description of how they are planted, maintained and plucked. With the five minute tour you get, “This is a tea bush.”
I have had a few tea professionals here for a tour lately. If you let me know you have an elevated interest in tea I will style the tour to fit your interest. Otherwise I am dealing with folks that love tea but have no idea where it comes from or how its made. I do not tell folks how to brew or how we brew our tea. Everyone does it completely differently so I sell them my tea and off they go. One thing, my tea is called “raw, cut leaf,” a derogatory term in China. That means I do not screen, separate of blow the dust out, so it takes a bit more for a strong pot of brewed tea. Not having to please any sort of customer base, I make the tea the way we like it.
We did some experimentations on tea toasting these past couple weeks. As we dry our tea in the sun, we will toast our black teas when almost completely dry. We have tried different levels of leaf moister, depth of leaf on a trey, how hot and for how long. Every batch comes out differently! So we have slightly tweaked how we toast our black tea, but one thing is for sure, a light toasting makes a huge flavor difference compared to not toasting. Most producers dry their tea in an oven so they are not sure what I am talking about. I dry my tea in the sun the way I saw the Chinese doing it. We don’t toast our green tea thinking it would damage sugars and starches, but toasting green may be our next experiment. My wife said “I don’t even want to know!” if it improves the flavor. My father was an agricultural research scientist so I have it in my blood.
When we sold out of green tea last fall, I had to turn away a good number of regular customers. I have noticed that none of them have returned. If tea was my lively hood that would be serious. But I know someone else will come along and buy all the green tea I have packaged to sell. My wife worked for a beer distributor and we learned there , if a customer asked for a particular beer and not get it, they will not ask for it again.
Come see us down on the tea farm. Remember we have lots of birds, dogs, wildlife and biting bugs. If you are afraid of any of those a farm tour may not be good for you. Bring cash to pay for the tour and to buy a little tea. We do not do groups and small children are not usually very interested in tea culture.
Donnie Barrett