Submitted by Grace Duffy on the 2015 winter session program in Hawaii sponsored by the Department of Behavioral Health and Nutrition…
This week, we visited the Mealani Experiment Station of the University of Hawai’i at Manoa to make our own tea! We took a 7 hour course that taught us how to make tea from the leaves to the actual product. While picking from the tea leaves, we learned that the plants took almost eleven years to grow! Although we had to pick a large amount of tea shoots, only about 25% of these are used for the tea as they are mostly water. We chose to make either oolong tea, which is a yellow tea, or green tea. Depending on the type, leaves were set out to wither or go straight to the kill-green stage. Kill-green is a step that stops oxidation of the tea leaves at the desired level. During that stage, we microwaved the leaves. Afterwards, we rolled leaves in a wok to break the cell walls and let the juices and flavor come out. Finally, the tea leaves were dried for more than an hour. We then got to taste all of the different teas that we made. It was a great hands-on experience and I now appreciate tea so much more!
