Maocha
Tea being sun-dried to make maocha on the roof top in a tea farm worker's home in Yunnan. This is obviously for home use. Notice how the tea has already become darker colour upon long exposure to the sun.
In traditional tea processing, a maocha ( Chinese: 毛茶 ) is the tea that has undergone processing but not ready for retail sale yet. A maocha still has to go through a few finishing steps:
- Oversize and other not properly processed leaves, leaves from other plants that have fallen into the plucks, twigs, bugs, etc are sorted out.
- In some varieties, the tea have to be graded by size.
- Before wholesale packing, the leaves have to go through one or more rounds of baking, roasting and/or short heating to be fit for retail sale or storage for maturity. In the case of traditional oolongs and some green teas, these last rounds of heat application are very specialised and critical to the tea’s final quality.
The term maocha is sometimes translated as “crude tea”, as in crude oil. However, that is somewhat inappropriate, since you cannot put crude oil into your car engine, but you can drink maocha perfectly alright. It is drunk by most tea farmers. Consumers who go directly to the tea farms to buy almost always are given maocha. In the case of pu’er, many producers sell mocha as shengcha pu’er.
The term maocha appears in the following articles and discussions in this site:
- “Raw” Puer or “Cooked” Puer?
- Bulang Shengcha Pu’er
- Classic Style Phoenix — Xingren Xiang Dancong
- Eight Immortals
- Green Tea Production: Sun-drying
- Huoba Cha, Bundled Maocha
- Huoba Cha, Bundled Maocha
- Laos maocha for making pu’er shengcha
- Laos maocha for making pu’er shengcha
- Laos Maocha, semi-dark white tea
- Laos Shengcha
- Master Zou Bing Liang inspecting two batches of maocha for blend
- Phoenix Oolong: Classic Styles
- Post-fermented Tea (dark tea)
- Pu’er: Myth of Origin & Reality of Blending
- Shengcha
- Sun-drying tea in Yunnan for maocha production
- Sun-drying tea in Yunnan for maocha production
- Sunning tea leaves in Yunnan
- Tea and Your Health: an Orientation
- What Really is a White Tea?
- Wild tea maocha, Laos
