Amber: Chinese style golden color, standard for premium black tea

YuanJia131

Boil the water and take out a traditional black tea selected last year. When the golden tea soup is poured into a fair cup, it is not an ordinary yellow color, but an amber color. Like the time when resin solidified millions of years ago, it exudes an old warmth.
When the light hits, Noodles in soup appear a halo, which is crystal light. It's not a shiny oil that floats on the surface, but a sparkling light that seeps from the bottom of the soup.
The tea soup gently sways in the cup, with a hint of imperceptible smoothness, like glass flowing slowly under the light, it is called "glass soup". The thickness of ancient glass flowing is not the thinness of white water, but the heaviness of the contents.
To make this "amber, crystal light, and glass soup" from black tea, it mainly relies not on brewing techniques, but on the "foundation" of the tea itself.

The enchanting amber color of black tea lies in the golden balance of theaflavins and thearubigins in the tea leaves. And the control of this ratio almost entirely depends on the craftsmanship of the tea makers, that is, the control of the process.
From picking, withering, rolling to fermentation, every step is a test. Especially the fermentation process directly determines the direction of the soup color. Gongfu black tea pursues a bright red color, often requiring deep fermentation; And the pursuit of this translucent amber color - commonly referred to as golden yellow by tea lovers - requires extremely precise control over the degree of fermentation in high-end black tea.
If fermentation goes out of control for the sake of convenience or due to inadequate technology, even if the resulting soup is red, it will be dead red or dark red, and there will never be such vivid "amber color" and "crystal light".
So, you can see this amber colored cup because the tea makers have clean and excellent craftsmanship. This is the ingenuity given by humans.