Rock tea has its own seasonal logic. Although it has passed the beginning of autumn, the country still maintains a “red” high-temperature sauna. At this time, rock tea is also in the midst of fire entanglement. In summer, the booming roasting season is just right.
Once, a tea that exploded on Tiktok was famous for fire, Zhengyan Badaohuo. On one hand, it’s selling well, and on the other hand, it’s being criticized. Today, let’s discuss a technical activity with everyone: how many rounds of roasting are necessary for rock tea to be reasonable!?
01 The function of roasting
The roasting process of Wuyi rock tea has always been unique in the “tea forest”. In Liang Zhangju’s “Notes on Returning to the Fields” in the Qing Dynasty, the roasting process of rock tea was praised as “Wuyi roasting method, truly unparalleled in the world”. Being hailed as the best in the world often relies more on technology than quantity.
However, when it comes to technical details, rock tea is particularly personalized, and each household’s technical details have their own strengths.
The widely recognized rock tea master Yao Yueming’s “Yao’s Roasting Method” in modern times is summarized by his old friend as follows: integration, differentiation, qi enhancement, and promotion of alcohol.
Integration involves stacking and blending tea leaves of the same quality, followed by shaping and stir frying to ensure consistent tea quality and improve the cost-effectiveness of tea products; Transform and use pyrotechnics to remove impurities from the raw tea; Raise Qi, pay attention to increasing the tea Qi when roasting tea; Promotes alcohol content by heat treatment to enhance the color, taste, and sweetness of the soup.
To sum up with all these verbose words, roasting has its own purpose, and once the purpose is achieved, it’s okay without any unnecessary actions. And modern scientific research has also proven this.
Those who advocate multiple roasting methods are generally friends who enjoy sufficient heat, so let’s take the caramel aroma in sufficient heat as an example. The caramel aroma is mainly controlled by a substance called “2-acetylfuran”. It can be understood that the more this substance is, the more obvious the caramel aroma of the tea is.
From this, we can see that narcissus reached its peak caramel aroma at roasting level 3 and cinnamon at roasting level 4, but the content of this substance decreased in subsequent roasting compared to before.
All the teachers in Mount Wuyi have heard the saying, “If you don’t have enough green, you can gather the fire”. The popular two to three baking methods nowadays also take into account the redundancy of baking technology.
In Yao Yueming’s Yao’s Baking Formula, it is emphasized that “roasting is done in one step, fully baked without turning green”. This method is still an important refining process for Wuyi rock tea to this day.
In fact, to some extent, the fewer times a tea with the same roasting technique is roasted, the better the master’s roasting and greening skills may be.
02 The less baked, the more likely you are to earn
Speaking of making money, the good sales of Ba Dao Huo may not have anything to do with Zhengyan’s one size one product, it may just have caught some of the consumer psychology of a certain music company that loves to take small discounts.
However, from the perspective of merchant profit margin, the profit margin of buying 2 pounds of tea with 299 may not be higher than any sky high priced tea.
Everyone can calculate the cost of tea in Mount Wuyi Zhengyan. I have seen that the lowest Zhengyan cinnamon tea is 50 yuan per kilogram, and the cost of making a kilogram of tea is 500 yuan per kilogram.
Today, I will introduce the cost of baking. The price of Mount Wuyi charcoal baking room is about 6-10 yuan for baking a catty of tea. Taking the middle value of 8 yuan, the cost of baking 8 times is 64 yuan.
In addition to the hard cost of roasting, there are also many hidden costs associated with roasting. One is loss, roasting will make the tea more fragile, and every time it is roasted, a pile of tea foam will be screened out. One roasting consumes 1-5% of dry tea. How much is left after 8 passes?
And roasting also has uncertainty. If the good raw materials of Zhengyan are roasted with an extra layer of fire, they may not sell as well as high mountain tea if they are burnt out. So even for the sake of making money, most tea lovers will try to control the number of roasting times, not the more the better.
In fact, if something goes wrong, there must be demons. The better it is baked, the better it is stored, and the more expensive it is stored This increasingly obvious anti logical sales sentence pattern usually represents some degree of sales fraud. It’s better to go around when you see it.
03 Reflection behind the Eight Flames
Eight Fire Cinnamons, logically speaking, is the same as a fake tea competition in a certain spring. Some people who have mastered the channels and traffic want to take advantage of the popularity of Wuyi Rock Tea to cut a wave of leeks.
Although these people have access to the passwords for traffic and channels, they are unwilling to make good products, or they have absolutely no need to waste time on products.
For these traffic traders, they sell all kinds of tea, and sell all kinds of tea. The chives of eight fire cinnamon have been cut off, and the rest of the mess need not be cleaned up, so that local tea farmers in Mount Wuyi can take the blame.
You didn’t see that the beautiful female anchor came out and proudly said, ‘Look, I can sell 299 for two pounds, you don’t even have enough cost.’. But they completely ignore the fact that their product does not even have the qualification of Rock Tea SC.
Another phenomenon behind the 299 Eight Flames is gift tea, which is similar to the hype of a certain can of tea back then. 299 tea can hold ten large cigarette sticks, divided into five gift bags, with an average of 60 yuan per friend. It has to be said that it is quite prestigious, but it also has to be said that it is quite pitiful to know such friends.
The performance of local tea farmers in Mount Wuyi in this matter is still worthy of praise. From various angles, they deeply investigated and cracked down on counterfeits. Fake videos on a certain platform are also constantly emerging,
But have you ever thought about why these fake videos, even including SC that does not meet national standards, do not hold this anchor responsible for any flaws? Even adding to her traffic.
The traffic trap behind this is also worth pondering for every serious product developer. But behind this is indeed a vicious cycle that is difficult for each individual to solve. Let’s not curse and let this phenomenon of bad money chasing good money play out in the rock tea circle.
Serious tea lovers cannot taste good tea, and the tea of serious tea lovers will not sell well. Let’s curse, it’s just adding traffic to those internet celebrities who claim to be ‘black and red’.