"When the roasting tea craft arrives at home, the silver does not worry about flowers for a year." Just by virtue of this saying that is passed down among the Wuyi camellia people, it shows the importance of the process of roasting tea. To make Wuyi oolong tea, the process is complex and rigorous. Wuyi tea maintains the traditional roasting method of oolong tea for more than a thousand years, and the charcoal roasting work after the oolong tea enters the refining stage is called a unique skill, and it seems that there are few processes, but it is actually a magic point to play the charcoal fire. No wonder the Qing Dynasty scholar Liang Zhangju would exclaim: "Wuyi baking method, real armor the world." ”
"Roasting tea is playing with fire, playing well to bake is a good tea, and if it is not roasted well, it will be wasted to go to the painstaking efforts of a spring tea." Nowadays, many of the tea farmers and friends in Wuyi Mountain are descendants of the tea family and tea roasters. They have experienced many failures in roasting tea to have such experience. When I went to the tea farmer's factory to see the bakery, before anyone arrived at the factory, they smelled the flowing tea fragrance in the distance. The aroma of tea with a fiery charm is somber. The aroma of tea that is being roasted wafts out, and the aroma of tea is everywhere, and even the flowers and plants at the foot of the fence wall are stained with the afterscent of tea.
Watching the master do "water baking", he draped the ashes on the baking pit like a bun, revealing the red blazing of the charcoal fire, and the fire was very fierce. "Water roasting" is the first roasting, and the early stage needs to be fiercely fired to remove the moisture on the surface of the tea leaves. In order to continue to let the trace amount of water left in the tea quickly evaporate, the fire can be adjusted to the degree of hot, the master said: This is about 100 degrees, right? The master turns the tea leaves every twenty or thirty minutes. After the "water roasting" tea leaves, the color turned to green brown, and the rope became tighter and tighter.
If you are roasting refined tea, you must remember the essential of "low temperature and long baking". Temperature is the most important thing for roasters to pay attention to. The doors and windows of the bakery are closed without leaking, and when the roaster is seen guarding the door, even if people are sleepy, they cannot close their eyes and go to sleep. Turn the tea leaves in the roasting basket once every half an hour to heat it evenly and prevent the tea from being burned. It is also necessary to take care of the weak charcoal fire in the roasting pit, the charcoal fire is weak, and the roaster has to tiptoe to remove the roasting cage, use the ash knife to pull the lid ash away, let the inner layer of charcoal fire be exposed, or add new charcoal. In order to retain the aroma, it is also necessary to cover it with a bamboo arc cover to prevent the aroma from getting lost.
Green-brown tea leaves, excellent tea leaves with excellent shape, fluffy tea leaves, with a slight grip on the palm of the hand to feel dry, in fact, this is not the case, these newly roasted tea leaves in the process of storage and moving, and dived into the air of water. This kind of water is not felt with the naked eye. Therefore, every once in a while, the tea leaves must be taken out and returned to the fire. Tempering is "tempering baking". Most of the "tempered" teas are refined, so special care must be taken. The tea stall is placed on the sieving of the roasting basket, and there are many fine holes in the sieving, and the force of the charcoal fire is directly rushed through the fine holes. It is very exquisite to lay tea leaves on the sieving, not too thickly, and evenly spread out. The careful approach is to pad a piece of raw paper under the tea leaves, which must be fished from bamboo pulp so that there will be no odor pollution. This can prevent the tea crumbs from falling into the roasting pit through the sieving and causing fumigation smoke, which affects the original taste of the tea leaves and spoils the charm of the whole cage of tea leaves. The charcoal fire raised in the roasting pit, the fire can not make it too naked, you must use a shawl to cover the lid ash on the charcoal fire. Only the thickness of the ash can adjust the strength of the charcoal fire.
Charcoal and ash are indispensable in the process of roasting tea. Charcoal is also exquisite. Lu Yu said in the Tea Classic: "Its charcoal was once burned, and it was greasy, and it was not used for anointing wood and vandals." "It can be seen that the firewood used to burn charcoal is also forbidden to use odorous firewood, such as pine, cypress, maple have a fat oil fragrance, and the charcoal burned must have a peculiar smell, which is not suitable for roasting tea." Charcoal burned from firewood from a hard broad-leaved forest, the charcoal fire is bright red. The charcoal fire raised in the middle of the baking pit is strong in fire, resistant to burning, and not easy to turn into ashes. When the charcoal fire is placed in the baking pit, it must be immediately covered with cover ash to maintain the firepower. Cover ash is actually a powder of charcoal, that is, ash. The ash needs to be sieved through a fine eye screen to remove the particle impurities, and its ash is as fine as powder, which is the best cover ash. Cover ash is very clean, dirty cover ash, will spoil the smell of fire. Covering the ash and covering the charcoal is a temperature regulation method that is difficult to operate in the process of roasting tea.
Keeping the lid ash is particularly exquisite, even if it is a little odor intervention, it will also affect the innocent aroma of the roasted tea. The roasting master is very serious about the protection of the lid ash. In the charcoal bakery, several cloth bags of things hang from the hanging beams. The roaster told me that the bag contained lid ash. Cover ash can not be easily placed on the ground, no matter how clean the surface, there will be a salty odor left after stepping on the foot, cover ash will absorb the moisture and salty odor on the ground after landing. Master Ying of TianxinYan Tea Village also told a small story: once the lid ash in his bakery was not placed well, and the kittens in the family spilled urine. No one noticed it at the time. When roasting tea, this pile of lid ash is used. Inhaling the lid ash of the cat's urine smell, under the charcoal fire, the odor is heated and diverged, directly into the tea flavor. The roaster will be the newly roasted tea a pin, he even screamed bad badly, so that the family of the second monk confused, it turned out, brewed in the rock tea soup smell, vaguely can smell the smell of fishy urine, those who are good at tasting tea, the aroma of this cage of tea does not dare to compliment. From then on, Master Ying did not dare to take the custody of the cover ash lightly.
A traditional trick of the roaster is to measure the temperature of the roasting cage with the back of the palm of the palm, and the old hand of the roasting master is the best "thermometer". The master judges the temperature of the charcoal fire in the baking cage, as long as the palm is pasted on the wall of the baking cage, he can say the temperature of eight or nine inseparable from the ten, or use the back of the palm to paste on the baking cage wall, and can say the accurate temperature. The master said that there is a difference between the temperature of the palm and the back of the palm to measure the roasting cage. The palm is rough, the skin and flesh are aging, the sense of touch is not so smart, and the temperature difference generally felt will be greater; the palm back is more afraid of heat than the palm, because the blood vessels on the palm are densely packed, and the temperature felt when the violent blood vessels touch the object will be more accurate. Once, the master was roasting tea in the roaster, and we asked him to personally use the palm of his palm to sense the temperature of the roasting cage. He touched the cage with his palm for a few seconds and then said: More than 80 degrees, right? Then use the back of the palm to paste the baking cage, and say with certainty: it is 84 degrees, at most one or two degrees! We scanned it with a borrowed infrared thermometer, and sure enough, it was almost the same: the temperature scanned by the thermostat from the wall of the cage was 81 degrees!
The kung fu of roasting tea is to skillfully put on the gray to temper the temperature. Emperor Huizong of Song also studied the proportion of charcoal ash used for roasting tea, and he wrote in the "Treatise on Daguan Tea": "Roasting is placed in the furnace with cooked fire, and seven points are combined with static ash, and three points are exposed to fire... "When tasting tea, we often hear tea friends say that this tea fire power is high, that tea fire power is low, and so on. This fire work is baking work. The level of fire power refers to the degree of time that tea leaves absorb charcoal during the roasting process. Tea roasters roast a variety of fire teas. Roasting tea with low fire power is not an easy task. The low-fire tea in the oolong tea method is most willing to be drunk by most people because it must maintain the fragrance of the tea leaves. Roast low fire power tea, the most taboo tea leaves on the roasting cage with a fierce fire, charcoal fire does not dare to be fierce, cover ash to be slightly thicker, cover tighter, the most afraid of charcoal fire a fierce, the aroma to roast off. To retain the fragrance, it is necessary to let the force of the charcoal fire slowly emit, maintain the constant heat of the charcoal fire in the baking pit, and add a bamboo arc cover. The general principle of roasting tea in the fire is to start from low temperature, long time, at least twelve hours, sometimes as many as twenty-four hours, so that roasted tea can achieve "foot fire". The tea roasted by this fire work has a twisted shape like a rope, brown but not burnt black. Boiling water brewed out of the tea soup, with a charming rock rhyme fragrance, brew such a tea, slightly indulge in sitting in the cup time, the cup of tea soup is more golden, brownish red, the charm is long, the taste is mellow, the average person does not feel the taste of fire. If the roasting time is prolonged, the charcoal fire is too fierce, beyond the limit of the high fire power, the tea leaves will inevitably be charred. Such almost roasted tea, some people also call it "high fire power tea". Brewing such tea, do not dare to sit in the cup, otherwise, the tea soup is as thick as sauce, the fire flavor is full, the scorching bitterness is strong, the aroma is all swallowed by the fire, such tea, the general tea guests are not willing to drink it.
The story left in the Wuyi Tea Roastery is as refreshing as the tea aroma wafting out of the cup every day. We should remember the terms charcoal fire, cover ash, roasting cage, etc., which are getting farther and farther away, and we should remember the imprint left by tea farmers on the back of the palm of the roasted basket. Tell the children the story of why a pot of cat urine spoiled a cage of tea, and remember a hot topic that we often talk about today: the protection of intangible cultural heritage. We should cherish these intangible cultural heritages rooted in the land of Wuyi Camellia Township in order to drink the history of tea and the true taste of tea.
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