One teaspoon of Malawi black in eight ounces of boiling water in a mug infuser. Brew for 90 seconds, no more. (Square Peg may find that 88 seconds is better.) Take out the tea in infuser and brew in a second mug (eight ounces) all morning or until you want it. Drink first mugful when it's cool enough. Drink second mugful whenever you want. The first mug should have most of the caffeine, and the second mug has a crisp bitter/sour taste, like grapefruit. Toci
I find Malawi Black a rather crude tea. Not surprising, considering the noise, the steam and the dark industry of a typical Malawi LTP factory. Most of the country's black teas are LTP - the Lawrie Tea Processor, named after the inventor - a thunderous hammer mill with a huge yawning maw swallowing more than a tonne of withered leaf an hour and belching out macerated leaf in a six foot arc of steaming green. So different to the delicate Malawi white teas skillfully hand made from the same bushes.
For me in African black tea mood I choose a Rwandan BOP1 grade cut on freshly sharpened CTC rolls and preferably from Gisovu Tea Factory - possible the best CTC tea in the world. Bright, orange colored, brisk, tasting of tea country itself. Five grams (two teaspoons) in an infuser in 240 ml (8 US flud oz) of rolling boiling water and steep for 60 seconds while agitating the infuser, add 12 ml of semi skimmed cows' milk (2% fat) and no sugar. And no second steeping!
Having seen a CTC machine in action once, I'm not sure why it never occurred to me at the time, but now I'm intensely curious: How in the world would you sharpen CTC rolls? Is there specialized hardware or is this a Herculean manual job?
On Nov 1, 8:44 pm, Lewis Perin snipped-for-privacy@panix.com wrote:
It's not a job for the faint hearted. A factory may have 3 or 4 lines of CTC and each line will have four CTC machines (= 16 m/c) each wih a pair of rolls (= 32 total). A roll is up to 48" long and 8" diameter (modern ones can be 13" dia). Each roll weighs around 500lb minimum. Rolls consist of forged stainless steel rings locked on a mandrel that fits into bearings on the machine. Each roll is toothed. Two rolls on each machine mesh with each other and are turned counter rotating (30 HP motor - some real power) so that leaf be pulled through the gap or "nip" between them. The nip is adjusted down to about 1/32" - this crushes the cells when around 2,400 lb of leaf an hour is going through that small gap. The teeth on the rolls are special - here's where the sharpening comes in. Rolls are re-sharpened in matching pairs every 150,000 lb or so of leaf, so there is a constant cycle of resharpening. A special lathe is used combining turning with milling. Turning - to groove the roll circumferentially at 8 grooves to the inch (V shaped grooves with raised V shaped upstands between them). Milling - to cut helical grooves around the roll, across and to the same depth as the circumferential groove. Now we have a pattern of teeth of 1/8" width and 3/8" long - and about 29,000 teeth per roll. The milling cutter makes one face of each tooth vertical and the trailing edge at about 30 degrees. Imagine these two rolls meshing and counter-rotating - and (here's the clever bit) with one roll turning 10 x as fast as the other. Fast roll rotates at 700 rpm and slow one at 70 rpm. Any leaf between the teeth is sliced by the fast tooth face against the slow tooth face, while being carried through the nip - this (repeated at 29,000 x 700 = 20 million times a minute) cuts the leaf into very small crushed particles - as electron microscopy reveals, "popping" even individual chloroplasts - where the fermentation enzyme Polyphenol Oxidase is located. The helical grooving was originally intended (by inventor William McKercher) to give some curl to the particles, but properly made they are not now curled flakes (his original aim) but should be in tiny cuboids.
Blunt rolls give a muddy tea. Sharp rolls give brightness in the cup. The downside is that every sharpening reduces the diameter of the roll so hastens replacement expenditure. Such is life.
Always good to have your news from the sharp end. I speak mainly from an East African view point where four cuts are typical. U profile is more normal but I balked at describing a U profile sharp tooth to non tea engineers! CTC is certainly made at 7,000 ft plus in Kenya and Rwanda and very successfully too - Gisovu BOP1 was selling at USD 3.80/ kg recently, Kenyan high grown KTDA CTCs at 3.40 plus. I have tasted some green CTCs and LTPs made on the small scale - very harsh and metallic liquor - not very promising.
I must be misunderstanding something here, but allow me to show my ignorance. It seems to me that the crushed leaves emerging from a CTC machine, with their juices largely expressed and exposed to the air, would already be substantially oxidized/fermented. So how could the product be considered green tea?
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