Customer Question: I’ve heard that machine-harvested tea is generally of poor quality, which is why it’s usually cheap. Why is machine harvesting worse than hand-harvesting? Does Chang-Hsing Tea also sell machine-harvested tea, and how is the quality?
Chang-Hsing Tea: Not at all! Machine harvesting has no absolute correlation with quality! Machine harvesting simply means using machines to pick the tea leaves. The advantages are labor savings and fast harvesting speeds. Because it saves on labor, the production costs are lower. Machine-harvested tea is generally more affordable mainly due to lower costs, not because of its quality.
In fact, if used at the right time, machine-harvested tea can actually be easier to control for quality than hand-harvesting. A single tea-harvester can work at a speed equivalent to about 100 people. Because it is fast, harvesting can be concentrated during midday and afternoon when the tea leaves are at their most aromatic. Hand-harvesting, on the other hand, goes from morning till night, making the quality of the freshly picked leaves harder to manage than machine-harvested ones.
The perception that machine-harvested tea is inferior to hand-harvested tea mainly comes down to the timing of the harvest. Sometimes, after days of continuous rain, harvesting falls behind schedule, and farmers resort to machines just to salvage their crop and avoid total loss. Since these harvested leaves are mostly picked in the rain or when they’ve grown too old, the resulting tea quality is lower. This is an issue of harvest timing, not the machine harvesting method itself.
Disadvantages of Machine-Harvested Tea
Machine harvesting tea is not without its drawbacks. First, the process can easily cause leaf damage, making the appearance of the tea a bit more broken. Additionally, it can easily scoop up older leaves and impurities during harvesting. However, these flaws can all be resolved through refined processing. Nowadays, after the loose tea (maocha) from machine harvesting is made, it goes through an extra sorting step to remove stray twigs and ensure there aren’t excessive old leaves or stems. It’s safe to say that the drawbacks of machine harvesting have been successfully overcome.
Chang-Hsing Tea also offers machine-harvested tea! Most of our machine-harvested tea comes from Mingjian Township, where the tea quality is excellent, very reasonably priced, and quite good overall. It’s a great value choice offering high quality at an affordable price. We warmly invite you to give it a try!