Oxidation, Fermentation, and Tea

by Ryan | From the Interns, Tea Education

For much of its history, the oxidation process in tea crafting has been erroneously referred to as the “fermentation step”. This is because people assumed that the change of color in the leaves was the result of traditional fermentation. This is not the case, as fermentation requires microorganism, such as yeast. As advances in technology made it easier to study molecular chemistry, tea crafters were able to identify this process as oxidation, rather than fermentation.