Tea is the most popular drink in the world and there are countless ways we make and consume it. But if you want to drink tea in the oldest way, we still know of you’ll first need to hike deep into the remote tea mountains of southwest china and hand-pick leaves and buds from tea trees that are hundreds of years old. It’S a long way to go for authentic chinese tea, but one person is doing it. This great big story was made possible by [ Music ].
My name is xinhan tang, i’m the owner of trunk, which is a tea house in new york city. We specialize in historic chinese tea, historicities really represent the pinnacle of tea culture, and these teas are usually not mass-produced and they’re, trying to be as authentic to the tea as possible. It’S almost like a masterpiece of music played versus a practice or a original piece of artwork versus the copies the masterpiece, tea so to speak, comes from ancient tea, trees that grow in the wild. The only bud for 15 days out of the year, so chunan must race each spring to find the trees and harvest them in time with the help of local farmers. The best tea trees are always on some of the hardest to get to places because they need to be on very steep slopes. We usually motorcycle a little bit. Sometimes we tread water. Sometimes we climb in this region. It’S not uncommon for tea trees to grow. For several hundred years, these tea trees right now is at its prime, and this is what he is meant to taste like tasty.
Once we pick the tea, we need to spread it out in a whole area where the water can travel out before we can walk fry. The tea. This step is to kill the enzymes, so the tea fermentation can be stopped. Then we take the tea leaves out, and then we roll the tea once the sun dry, the tea. You need to pick out any discoloration. This sorting process usually takes months to finish because we do have to do them one by one, with every single tea months. Will go by before this tea is ready to be poured out, but the journey is well worth it to shannon those extreme fine points in taste that he offers us. I think it provides us a level of joy. That’S beyond anything else, and my job here is to preserve this art and hopefully even push it to a new height. You
