Tea Baking Effects

Video Transcript

We're talking about tea today. Now I'm going to talk about the importance of baking oolong tea. Baking is the final step in oolong production and it's done for a few reasons. Actually, all oolong tea is baked, but not all oolong tea is given a heavy bake. Now the reason why it's baked is to remove a little bit of excess moisture from the tea as well as add a little carmelized coating to the outside of the tea and this will preserve the tea and increase its shelf life. Another, so a very, very high mountain oolong that's not oxidized very much and relatively green, this is a tea that doesn't need to be baked very much, but a tea that is maybe a little bit lower elevation or oxidized fully, or more towards 40%, then this type of oolong could use a heavier bake to enhance the flavor. Baking will bring out certain flavors, more fruity and sort of a citric undertone can come out from baking. So here I have two examples of oolong tea. This one is unbaked and then this one is a baked oolong. So you can see the difference in the coloration. This one is just a little bit browner. It has these stems. The most obvious is they're very brown whereas here we have the stems are almost a yellow or golden color. Another reason to bake oolong is to revitalize the tea. So if the tea has been in storage for a year and it's lost some of its freshness then I can put it in the baker here and bake it for a couple of hours and then it will regain some of its freshness as well as disperse some of the moisture that the tea has collected because tea is always absorbing moisture from the air. So that's a good way to increase the storage and the shelf life of tea, and with regard to aging tea, that's one practice that's used is each year the tea is taken out, baked, sealed up again, and put back in storage for another year. So those are some of the reasons to bake oolong tea.

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