Why is tea stepped on by feet?

Tea farmers call barefoot stepping on tea leaves a traditional tea-making process, also known as "stepping on the green", which is mainly used to make green tea and yellow tea.

The process is usually divided into the following steps:

Picking: young leaves are picked at the right time and under the right weather conditions.

Killing: The picked leaves are put into a pot with high temperature to quickly kill the enzymes in the tea leaves and stop their oxidation.

Twisting: The tea leaves are twisted after greening to form strips and break the cells, so that the cell juice inside the tea leaves is evenly distributed.

Stamping: The twisted tea leaves are placed on a flat surface and stepped on with clean bare feet to press the tea leaves into a thin slice.

Drying: The tea leaves are put into a dryer to remove excess water.

Inherent in this traditional process is the fact that stomping effectively crushes the tea leaves, allowing the internal cellular juices to fully flow out, facilitating chemical reactions and enhancing the aroma and flavor of the tea.

In addition, stepping on the green can also keep the tea leaves at a certain humidity, which is conducive to the fermentation and oxidation of the tea leaves.

However, since treading the green requires the use of bare feet to tread on the tea leaves, which may pose health and safety hazards, most of the modern tea-making processes have already adopted mechanical kneading to replace the step of treading the green.

In fact, there is no need to worry too much, purely handmade ancient method of tea production process is complex, labor costs, material costs are relatively high, so prices are not low, if you are not enthusiastic tea drinkers, and can not drink it, there is no need to worry about, hahaha