About Black Tea Leaves

"Now, I want to tell you about black teas. Black tea has the highest caffeine content of all the teas. If you will look down here at the black tea I brought. I'll show you a comparison, it's much darker in color than the green tea and that's were we get the name black tea from. It's more the color of the leaf than it is the actual drink. Black tea has four stages of processing, withering, rolling, oxidation and drying. Basically they allow the leave to wither for awhile and then they roll it. By rolling I don't mean rolling into the little pearls like I showed you with the green tea but they're actually bruising the leave and this allows the oil and juices to interact with the oxygen in the air which is what begins to turn the leave black is that oxidation process and then they are dried. There are many kinds of black teas and many types of green teas that we will talk about that later. The basic black teas are going to have those four steps. It's allowed to oxidized a lot so that it turns black."