Yu Chin-ming is the sixth generation of his family to grow tea. At Chinming Organic Tea Garden he farms the way the land asks him to: no pesticides, no chemical fertiliser, grass left to grow between the rows, insects left to share the leaves, and every batch sorted by hand to protect its quality. His wife and sons work the garden alongside him, so that every cup carries the garden's fragrance and lingering finish, and the family's tea culture survives another generation.
Taking over at sixteen
Yu was sixteen when his father died and the garden passed to him. He learnt to grow tea from his uncles, and shouldering a family business at that age cost him dearly. His younger brothers and sisters helped in the fields as children, though they have long since built careers of their own. His wife, Huang Su-ching, learnt to pick tea after they married; today the two of them run the garden together.
Their son, Yu Wen-teng, studied electrical engineering and holds a full-time job elsewhere, but comes back to help his father manage the garden, make tea and handle sales. He has taken tea-making courses at the government's Farmers' Academy and has now been helping for fifteen years. In time he plans to share the work with his younger brother and carry the business on.
The family farms about a hectare, of which only around three tenths is certified organic so far; the rest is going through certification. None of it, Yu stresses, has ever seen pesticides. The family was poor when he was young and simply could not afford them, so the garden has been chemical-free from the start. Certification merely made it official.
Farming with the grass, not against it
The garden runs on grass cultivation. Low-growing grass stays where it is, and even pulled weeds are left on the soil as green manure. A tea bush needs three to five years before its first harvest, time for the plant to grow strong. Pick too early and you shorten the bush's life and leave it prone to withering.
Yu does the planting himself. The garden grows Taiwan Tea Nos. 12, 13 and 27 alongside Qingxin oolong; No. 27 carries a floral note that suits Pouchong and oolong teas.
Huang says the secret of picking is to take only the tender shoots, one bud and two leaves, without bruising them; that is what holds the quality. Hired pickers join at harvest time. There are spring and winter pickings, with Oriental Beauty and honey-scented black tea picked around mid-May, while hot weather does not suit Pouchong at all.
No chemical agent of any kind is sprayed here, not pesticide, not weedkiller; weeding is done by hand. "If insects want to eat the leaves, let them," Yu says. "The insects and the tea can share the land. We don't spray them away, and that's how the ecology stays in balance."
The pests are real enough: red spider mites, stink bugs, tea green leafhoppers and tea moths. The garden simply lives with them. Yields suffered for the first three years, but from the fourth year the harvests came back.
Two days from leaf to tea
Turning fresh leaves into finished tea takes two days. The leaves are withered in the sun for half an hour, then withered indoors overnight, turned every two hours so the bitterness fades and the aroma and finish can develop. Next comes pan-firing to fix the leaves and bring out their fragrance, then the rolling machine, by which point the leaves are 60 to 70 per cent dry. A drying machine takes them to 70 or 80 per cent, they cool in a refrigerator, are sorted by hand, dried for a final half hour and only then packed. It is a serious undertaking. Yu has worked this routine since he was sixteen; it is his daily labour and the weight of the family business at once.
The leaf scraps left over from sorting become tea bags. The hardest job in the fields is hauling organic fertiliser up the terraced slopes. Indoors it is the overnight withering, which means staying up all night turning leaves; outdoors, there is no arguing with a sudden downpour during withering or picking. Making tea, Yu sighs, means living at the mercy of the weather.
Insect-bitten leaves come in uneven, so the garden sorts them by damage: lightly bitten leaves go into Pouchong, heavily bitten ones into honey-scented black tea. These days the garden mainly produces black tea, Pouchong and Oriental Beauty, sold directly to a loyal base of regulars, with camellia oil and wild honey alongside to draw new customers in.
How to brew it, and how to visit
Brewing barely differs between varieties; what matters is the steeping time. For Pouchong the first steep is best at thirty seconds, with ten seconds added to each steep after that, and the leaves are good for at least six rounds. Like it stronger? Steep it longer. Oolong wants a few minutes. Give each tea its own timing and its character comes through.
The garden also runs visitor days offering tea picking, tea making, guided tours and hands-on crafts, so customers understand tea and know where the cup in their hands comes from. Its Pouchong once took first prize at the Nangang Pouchong tea competition, which commands a higher price; competition tea is packaged by the farmers' association. Chinming grows, packs and sells its own harvest, stocked at organic grocers such as Leezen, at farmers' association shops around Taipei and at organic markets. The plan from here is steady: keep raising the quality, keep entering competitions to build the garden's name, and keep the visitor days going so that a very old tea culture carries on.