How Labor Shortages and Plucking Intervals Affect the Quality of Your CTC Milk Tea

What this means is that tea leaves are now being plucked at higher round intervals. Lets say you have 100 Hectares of Tea to be plucked by 100 pluckers. If 10 pluckers are required to pluck 1 Hectare then 100 workers will pluck 100 /10 pluckers = 10 Hectares per day, And 100 Hectares (the total area to be plucked / 10 Hectares per day = 10 days is the numbers of days required to pluck the whole garden. The garden is then said to have 10 Round Days of Plucking.

Because of increased absenteeism if lets say that instead of 100 pluckers we now have only 50 pluckers then 50 workers will only plucks 50 / 10 =5 Hectares per day, And 100 Hectares (the total area to be plucked / 5 Hectares per day = 20 days is the numbers of days required to pluck the whole garden. The garden is then said to have 20 Round Days of Plucking.

This is important because greater the no of Rounds Days of plucking, lower will be the quality of the Tea Made. The minimum number of days before which tea leaves should be plucked varies based on the type of tea and environmental conditions. Generally, for high-quality tea production, leaves should be plucked before they reach full maturity, typically within 2 weeks of new growth. For high quality Orthodox production it should a week. For CTC also many gardens stick to 7 days period however it is very difficult. The most practical round days for CTC should be less than 10 days. After this period there is degradation in the quality of tea made. The green leaves can become overly mature leading in 3 to 4 weeks with a severe decline in quality where it can lose all properties related a to an expected tea cup.

Overgrown tea leaves which go beyond the prescribed round duration of 10 to 11 days maximum are also very hard to wither. They are also have very low quantum of tea enzymes in them so they are very hard to oxidize. Poorly withered and oxidized teas have almost no tea flavour in them. They taste very plain and offer no experience. Though the dry leaves looks like any normal good tea, they have no taste in them. It is very easy to identify such quality. You can look at the infused tea leaves of such teas. They will appear mostly black. Well withered and oxidised teas have coppery, brownish appearance.

So next time your teas do not taste good, have a look and study the infused tea leaves. See if they have a black appearance or a coppery brown appearance. It is also a common practice to blend medium teas with low quality teas. The experts call them fillers. It lowers the blend price thereby increasing margins in profitability at the cost of sacrificing quality. Current price levels in milk tea have not kept pace with food inflation of other items so tea is still a very cheap beverage. It is important to buy tea without having any lower quality tea blended in them for a proper and rich tea experience. Full black looking infused tea cups should never be consumed.