Ripe Pu-erh Tea Fermentation Process

hello everybody today I mean hoon I heard some of the outskirts of our city and I'm in a tea factory that makes Shu chok ripe ripe for romantic words so today we're going to talk about this right port is made from raw quality so you first have to make your some Thai your mouth top your your rope for tea which you could drink as rope or tea or the right party needs to be kind that's called the worldwide process so here what you look is a pile that was started yesterday so the tea looks like like rope or tea there's about like maybe 1 ton of tea here and they've they've added water about 30% of water so it's very wet and it feels very warm I'd say the surface is about 3035 degrees and of course as you go inside the tea the temperature increases and this temperature has to be monitored it rises slowly with microbial activity so we're going to talk about this throughout the whole video but the temperature inside inside the pilot is what what he makes the taste of tea and besides of the fermentation speed and characteristics and we're going to see a few different types so this is a new pipe which was probably yesterday okay so here you can see another pine so apparently they they added water recently so how it works is your your pile is heating up and it takes a couple of days to heat up you monitor the temperature and when when it's too hot like when it reaches above 65 degrees you need to turn it you need to turn it otherwise it's gonna heat up too much and you'll end up with bad taste so you need to turn it maybe every couple of days every week during the fermentation and you also need to do that to come on how much a night to homogenize bathroom okay in this file we we can see so this pilot feels quite cold here and maybe but here it's hot because they added water so of course that the heat comes with water they spread the spray water to add some microbial activity let's check another let's check another pile over there that piling process can last between 20 and 70 days depending on on your parameters and how much fermentation you want in your tea nowadays those lowly lowly firm entities are quite popular usually they they come out of the pile with strong from a patient based but they since they still have some potential to age it usually gives a better tea after a couple of years but you can't really say sell it right away like a highly fermented tea and of course the tree depends on the taste and recently the trend is to make like lighter fermentation than before so this is my friend spine it's been fermenting fermenting for about 33 days I think now so you can see that here that the tea doesn't look like the tea doesn't look like rope war anymore it it looks much more like a finalized right war and so we could stop the fermentation at this point if we wanted a really lowly oxidized tea but he decides to to keep going with this fermentation what can we see here so on different layers you have so he just turned the pile so maybe it's a bit hard to see but on different layers you have a different kind of microorganisms that develop typically you have you have very very dark you have very dark fungi but that develop on the surface then when you dig in a little bit you'll come across a white layer which is another kind of mould and then when you come inside where the temperature is even higher then you get probably more bacteria than fungi because there's higher temperature and humidity which favors the development of bacteria instead of mold but I'm not sure about this that there might be a lot of mold it's just that it's not visible so okay inside maybe should be about fifty degrees and so usually you use a thermometer that you plant you stick into that the pile to consider to see the temperature inside okay and so that temperature will increase over the days the more water you put the more rapidly the temperature increases because water enhances microbial activity so you have many parameters that you can control when you firm entity you can so you can put more or less water you can turn the pile more or less often so if you don't turn it often that will allow for a higher from an fermentation temperature in the center of your pie in this pile if you zoom in here what you can see is little dots on the leaves and that's also a kind of fungi so and then if you dig in you see about five to ten centimeters under the surface you have that white layer okay so that that white layer has a moldy taste so it's also important that you turn the pile so that you mix that white layer and you don't allow them to consume all the material in the team and in the end you won't have amount taste if you if you mix it often well if you were to grow only that white layer that we have very moldy taste and if I did even further in the pipe so it's hotter and hotter and then so you can see that's kind of the smoke coming out actually it's not smoke it's just spores that are produced by the microorganisms and that's how they spread that the leaves inside the pile don't have don't have a parent malt and then but you can see that yeah they are releasing that kind of smoke and it's because it's many sports I guess yeah its spores that are not so you have some invisible you have some invisible mold and bacteria inside and so the third the further I dig in the more moisture you have in the leaves okay you can see that these leaves are very moist and the more the higher the moisture content the more likely the bacteria the more competitive the bacteria are this is the this is the the mold okay the the fungi they usually thrive in in drier conditions than bacteria so typically what will happen is that the guy who is in charge of the fermentation will welcome every day check the temperature inside try to check how the temperature evolves at at what speed it changes and he will make the decision of either like moving the pile like like shuffling something beliefs or adding water so of course that does that's a real skill that there's much more to it than what I explained but it's basically those basic decisions you have to manage the water content and the temperature in the pipe now it requires a lot of skill to to make right for and the details of that fermentation is usually the you could say the secrets the business secrets of the factories that produce these teas once the violet is fermented enough it needs to be cooled down but microbial activity needs to be reduced and to do that we just so we just opened the map so some trenches show us to increase the contact surface and allow the temperature to decrease and the microbial activity to decrease quite quickly also of course it there's a lot of water in our lives and we cannot expose our lives to the Sun or to some hot air it has to be cool dried food right means you just just a bit like white tea you just leave it in a shaded room for a couple of days and it will dry slowly so typically that that that step so what we just saw is the waterway process the tiding process and now is the annual process means you just refresh the leaves you let them calm down so you find the tea in the form of trenches just like you see on this picture then you wait for three days for it to cool down and you wait for the microorganisms to die and then you you shuffle the leaves and repeat again and then at some point when you when you feel the microbial activity has is reduced enough to achieve the full brain and keep killing all those microorganisms that you don't need anymore so you can see that this D has already been graded so in the pile actually you have all kinds of size you have all size of leaves you have really big channel big chance that we call chato it's just an agglomerate of leaves that occurs during the fermentation and you have all kinds of size so this is the small size this is called bolting and those are sorted that ripe for is shortened in a machine just after it's been inside so that's how girls you pay to read for the government fermentation service and sorting and grading service so like you keep them one time and what you get back is several grades of pure right forth so this is the traditional technique the traditional technique requires usually at least one ton of material to make sure that the fermentation goes well to make sure that the temperature can rise in microbial activity can develop but nowadays they also make smaller smaller batches like you can you can make bright tea with as skewers like 20 kilo that means your boob and of the same process but in a small basket and it requires another set of steel or well it's a service that's very popular now in [Music] okay so that that was the basics of fermentation and I will probably make other videos of this later but yeah this was basics so thank you for watching and I hope you learned a few stuff here good bye

Channel: Farmer Leaf

Views: 17,491

Keywords: pu-erh tea, fermentation, solid state fermentation, fermented food, shu pu-erh, ripe pu-erh

Id: oI4yDyH1oUM

Length: 13min 1sec (781 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 16 2018