Old Lu's Tea Musings IV

Old Lü's Tea Musings, Part Four

20250515

What does tea that has been fully and thoroughly "kill-green" processed look like?

As usual, let's use young raw tea (shengcha) as an example.

1. Liquor color. Under normal brewing, the liquor leans yellow or white—tea from forested areas tends more toward white. Heavily steeped liquor is mainly yellow. Conversely, if red dominates, it means the tea hasn't been fully processed.

2. Aroma. Floral and woody notes, such as orchid undertones with a woody base, or floral-honey with woody notes. If leaf-like or grassy green aromas appear, the tea hasn't been fully processed.

3. Mouthfeel. Raw tea that has been fully and thoroughly kill-green processed has a certain shape to its liquor—rounded and smooth, with good silkiness. Premium raw tea gives a sensation of sinking—it feels like you don't need to swallow; it just goes down on its own. Such tea is either thoroughly processed or sufficiently aged. A prickly, hard, dry, rough, or astringent sensation all indicate incomplete processing. Many people claim that fully processed tea lacks body and punch—that's incorrect. A fully processed raw tea retains its body, but it isn't abrupt; it's a calm fullness, a soft strength that's better appreciated when your body is unblocked and your mind is at ease.

4. Clarity. Fully processed raw tea feels like the sky after rain, like a vast blue ocean—clean, pure, a clarity that relaxes you, a tranquility simplified to the extreme.

5. Sweetness. The traditional layered complexity, bitterness transforming into sweetness, and salivation—none of that exists here. It's purely sweet (except for bitter teas). When fresh leaves from the forest are fully processed, the sweetness carries a crisp, cool quality—sweet from the very start, sweet in the aftertaste. This is the "plainness" that Caigentan (Vegetable Roots Discourse) emphasizes—no need for dramatic ups and downs, just calm, just purity, just enduring sweetness.

6. Consistency. The first infusion and the tail-end water should share the same flavor profile—for example, both clean and sweet with ample finish, differing only in intensity. The tail-end water should have no watery taste and remain pleasant to drink. If consistency is lacking and the flavor shifts between infusions, the tea hasn't been fully processed.

7. Physical sensation. Young tea can be drunk, and even in quantity. Of course, tea that has been fully and thoroughly processed still benefits from resting a few months before drinking—Longjing masters always advise trying new Longjing sparingly and waiting a month or so for the rest. When the tea causes minimal irritation, the bodily sensation is calm, and your tolerance for tea greatly increases—that's what fully and thoroughly processed tea is like.