Puerh Tea Cake Making
Puerh tea is mainly produced in Xishuangbanna, Lincang, Puerh and other regions in Yunnan Province. Puerh tea pays attention to brewing skills and tasting art, and its drinking methods are rich, which can be used for both clear and mixed drinking. Puerh tea soup is orange-yellow, with a sharp and long-lasting aroma, a unique aroma, strong flavor, and long-lasting foam resistance. Puerh tea has many benefits such as nourishing the stomach, anti-inflammatory and sterilization, anti-aging, diuretic and so on. The increasing price of Puerh tea today is also due to market benefits.
Step 1: Press processing.
Traditional Puerh cake tea was produced in the thirteenth year of Yongzheng (1735 AD) in Qing Dynasty. The cake circle means reunion. The Chinese people pay attention to many children and many blessings.
Puerh loose tea is graded according to the thickness, size and length of the raw materials. According to product needs, different pressing molds are used to press cake tea, brick tea, Tuo tea, gourd tea and other compact tea.
When pressing Puerh tea cakes, put the selected raw materials in the steam drum to make the loose tea soft under the action of steam, and then pour the steamed soft tea leaves into a special triangle cloth bag to gently knead and shape by hand. It is tied to the center of the bottom and put into a special round tea mold. It is pressed into a round tea cake that is thin on all sides but slightly thicker in the middle and about seven or eight inches in diameter. It is a traditional Puerh tea cake.
The second step; weigh tea.
Traditional Puerh pressed tea is generally divided into three parts: noodle tea, core tea and bottom tea. Noodle tea is the most delicate, followed by bottom tea, and core tea is relatively old compared to the first two. Therefore, different tea leaves will be divided into several raw materials to weigh. (This is from the aesthetic point of view of the finished cake tea and does not affect the quality of the tea.)
The third step: steaming tea.
Pour the weighed tea leaves in the order of bottom tea, core tea and noodle tea into a drum made of iron sheet, put it into the inner stern, and put the drum with tea leaves on top of the special steam equipment to steam and soften.
The fourth step: install tea.
Put the steamed soft tea leaves in a cloth bag that is shaped and sewn, wrap the mouth to make a shape, and set the basic shape of the pressed tea. Wrapping is a technical task. It is not a simple matter to make a tea cake with a round shape, a moderate and uniform thickness, and a beautiful shape with a well-shaped heart.
The fifth step: suppress.
After the tea bags are molded, they are placed in a mechanical pressing mold for compression molding according to different requirements. According to different shapes of squeezing tea, adjust the pressure, time and frequency of pressing.
Puerh cake tea generally uses the unique molding method of "mechanical pressing, stone mill setting". The mechanical pressing makes the content of the tea leaves be moderately released, and then the stone grinding is used to set the shape, so that the finished tea cake is moderately tight and the space density of the tea cake is uniform from the inside to the outside.
Step 6: Peel the cake.
After cooling the pressed tea stall, peel it from the cloth bag and spread it neatly on the tea rack.
Step 7: Drying.
After the product is pressed and shaped, it is generally placed on a tea rack and dried in the shade for 1-2 days before entering the baking room to dry at a low temperature. The temperature of the baking room is maintained below 40 degrees. The time for drying in the shade and the time for entering the baking room depend on different products.
Puerh tea uses the advantages of "mechanical pressing + stone mill setting" in the pressing process: the product thus formed is beautiful in appearance, full in cake shape, and the lines are clearly visible. The content of the substance released during brewing is moderate and uniform, and the aroma and taste are full. The internal quality is stable. The tea cake has moderate elasticity, the space density from inside to outside is more uniform, and the conversion is more uniform in the later period, which ensures the consistency and stability of the tea soup after the tea cake is aged.
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