How Many Different Tea Types are There?
Figures vary depending on how you slice it, but the usual number given for tea types is six. Roughly, we’re talking about half a football teams worth of tea categories.
What the term ‘Tea Type’ doesn’t include:
1. Tea Blends
Before we delve into the nitty gritty of tea types, we need to establish what I’m talking about when I say ‘type’, or rather, what I’m not talking about. I’m not talking about tea blends. These are your Earl Greys, your English Breakfasts, your Nectarine-Cherry-Asparagus-Pavlova-Crumble-Chais and what have you. You’ll already have guessed that, given that the number in the above paragraph was six, and not eleventy billion.
I have no idea quite how many different blends of tea there are. There are teas with spices, tea with fruit, tea with flowers, teas with chocolate, tea with other teas and much more. I’m not even going to try to work out the numbers given the rate that teamongers are bringing out new and exciting tea blends. (Whatever you’re after – gin and tonic tea, spelt and raisin cookie tea, espresso coffee tea – you’ll probably find it.) I am going to confidently state that tea blends are like the universe itself: ever expanding and infinite.
2. Locations
Nor am I talking about the locations in which the teas were grown. The teabag ingredients may tell you that your English breakfast tea is a blend of Assam, Sri Lankan and Rwandan teas. These are not tea types.
3. Things That Are Not Tea
And lastly, I am absolutely, emphatically not talking about things that are not tea. Chamomile tea is not tea. Nor is yerba mate or rooibos or bits of dried apple pieces and freeze-dried strawberry in a tea bag. Tea is the drink made from the leaves – and sometimes buds – of the Camelia Sinensis plant, and everything else should really call itself a tisane (or hot, wet, non-tea infused beverage. HWNTIB for short. I should come up with a better acronym, really.)
Tea Types
‘Tea type’ refers to the process that teas go through between the tea field and the tea cup. The list of 6 categories in full is:
Side Note About Black and White Teas
At this point you may want to interject. “Oi, Tea Fancier, doesn’t white tea mean tea with milk and black tea mean tea without milk?” Well yes. It certainly used to mean that, didn’t it? And ‘black’ and ‘white’ definitely still have those meanings when it comes to coffee. When you order a ‘flat white’ from your local friendly barista, you expect milky coffee, not some kind of first flush, unoxidized coffee bean brew, or, you know, whatever the coffee bean equivalent of these things would be.
The term ‘black tea’ to denote a particular tea type has been in use in the UK since the 17th century and ‘white tea’ since the 19th century so this fancy schmancy new tea language isn’t as new as one might expect. They weren’t terms that I remember being bandied about in my formative years though. And it does make a staple tea or coffee-related joke of my childhood obsolete.
“Black tea please.”
“Do you want milk with that?”
(Honestly, this was hilarious in the 1980s.)
Times have moved on since there was just one kind of tea and one’s options were to have it with milk or without. These days, one can take one’s black tea white and one’s white tea black.
Black tea
We’re going to start with black tea. Black tea is by far the most common type of tea drunk in the UK. 85% of all tea sold is black. It’s a good place to start because types of tea are determined by the oxidation process, or lack thereof. So if we start with a tea that does oxidise, it makes it easier to define the teas that don’t do it.
Oxidation – according to the BBC Bitesize Chemistry Revision Notes refers to “the gain of oxygen, loss of hydrogen or loss of electrons by a substance during a chemical reaction”.
Basically it’s the chemical process that turns stuff brown. Cut an apple in half, leave it on the sideboard and come back in a couple of hours. The fact that the exposed flesh is now an unappetizing shade of brown is oxidation in action. (If you literally followed that last step, then you can eat the apple now. We’re done with the apple analogy.)
The processes that black tea leaves go through are: withering, rolling, oxidation, drying and sorting. The withering process is the first stage of leaf drying, where the leaves lose about 60% of their moisture. The leaves are then rolled, either by machine or – in the case of many of the fancier ‘orthodox’ teas favoured here at Tea Fancier – by hand.
The oxidation process has already begun by the end of the first two steps, but further oxidation takes place afterwards when the leaves are spread out for up to 12 hours, and assume the blackish-brown colour we are all familiar with. Further drying takes place to ensure that the leaves won’t go mouldy in transit and then the leaves are sorted according to their leaf size and grade.
In China, black tea is called red tea (紅茶) because of the reddish colour of the steeped tea. It is a puzzle why, amongst all the colours of the tea type list, there isn’t one called ‘brown tea’, given that tea is, in fact, brown.
Check out all my Black Tea reviews here
Green tea
Green tea is not oxidised. Not oxidising tea isn’t simply a question of leaving out the oxidation processing steps that we went into in the black tea section. As you will have noticed with your apple earlier, oxidation happens anyway. And it starts very quickly. If you left your recently harvested tea in a big basket without doing anything to it then you’re not going to come up with green tea.
Tea producers need to take steps to stop the oxidation process kicking off in the first place. Like black tea, green tea is withered and rolled, dried and sorted. But the withering time is generally much shorter and it undergoes another stage after withering called ‘panning’. This is the process which halts oxidation. Different regions have different methods of doing this. In China, it is usually done in large vats, where the leaves are dry fried over heat. Whereas in Japan, it is usually achieved by steaming. This accounts for the distinct difference in taste between Chinese and Japanese green teas.
Oolong tea
But what, you may ask, if I don’t want to choose between fully oxidated tea and completely-not-oxidated-at-all tea? What if I want something in between? A cross between black and green teas – a ‘sludgy sort of olive-coloured’ tea, if you will.
Luckily, the tea industry has got your back, and has done since the 17th century.
Oolongs can be anywhere between 10% and 70% oxidised. Those that are oxidised up to 45% are generally considered to be more like green tea. And those that are over 45% are more like black teas. Oolong teas can run the gamut of not-quite-green to not-quite-black. There’s a whole gradient of green to black to explore here.
The production process for oolong tea leaves is a combination of the steps for both black teas and green teas. Like both, they are plucked and withered. Then they are oxidised like black teas but with a shorter oxidation time to halt the process. This is prescribed by the particular Oolong blend. Like green teas, they go through the panning process to stop oxidation (which, remember, could be anything from not-very-oxidized to quite-a-bit-oxidised) in its tracks.
The name oolong translates to “black dragon”. This is in reference to the shape of the dried leaves, which, if I’m honest with you, don’t look in any way like black dragons, no matter how hard you squint at them. In France, oolong is known as thé bleu (blue tea). This doesn’t make any sense either but at least it fits the whole ‘naming tea types after colours’ theme.
White tea
White teas are produced using only the buds and the topmost leaf shoots. (Some white tea varieties use the buds only.) They are plucked during a very short harvest time of about two weeks in the spring. There are only two stages of preparation: withering and sorting.
“Now, hang on a minute,” you may be saying at this juncture. “If white tea skips the panning bit of the process, how come they’re not all oxidised up the wazoo like black teas?”
This is an extraordinarily good question. I found myself wondering the exact same thing. Having had it impressed on me how crucial the panning stage (or “stop-green” stage as it is also known) is when retaining the delicate greenness of green teas, how the devil does white tea (which is, on the whole, even more delicate and even less like a black tea than green tea is) manage to get away with it?
Well, it turns out that it’s all down to the thoroughness of the leaf-drying at the withering stage. The leaves are dried out over a long period of time until there’s no moisture left. This halts the chemical processes that cause other types of tea to oxidise.
(Returning to our earlier apple analogy, in this scenario, rather than exposing your apple to the elements, you have carefully dehydrated it much like those dried apple slices you can buy and health food shops.)
White Tea does oxidise a bit during the withering phase. So although it is the least processed tea type, green tea gets the medal for the least oxidised.
Yellow tea
This is a pretty rare type of tea compared to the others on the list. This is because even by painstaking tea standards, yellow tea is a faff to produce.
Like Oolong, yellow tea is oxidised just a bit and in a special way. It goes through its own unique process called ‘smothering’ where the leaves are covered with cloth which – through some kind of tea-producing magic – makes the tea yellow in colour and less ‘grassy’-tasting than green tea.
It’s a time-consuming, highly skilled process which is only carried out in a handful of Chinese provinces. This is why yellow tea is much rarer than its green and black brethren.
Dark tea
This type this tea type is often referred to collectively as Pu-Erh but while Pu-Erh is a type of dark tea, there are other varieties out there.
Dark teas are also known as ‘aged’ teas, because what distinguishes them from other types of tea is the microbial fermentation process. Most teas are best drunk as soon as possible after plucking. Every year that you store tea in your tea cupboard sees a drop in quality in the resulting cuppa.
Except for dark brews, which much like fine wine – and myself – improve with age. There are several varieties of dark tea including Hubei green and Fu Zhuan brick teas. But – as we covered earlier – Pu-Erh is the most famous.
There are two types of Pu-erh tea. ‘Raw’ and ‘Ripe’. Raw Pu-Erh has been produced for 1,500 years. Whereas ripe Pu-erh tea is a johnny-come-lately tea variety invented in 1975. It simulates the aging process with an additional step called ‘heaping’. The leaves are heaped in a pile to facilitate fermentation. The heat generated by the natural chemical reaction “cooks” the leaves slightly. As you can imagine, this speeds up the process quite a bit and makes for a more affordable Pu-Erh than ones that have been stored for decades.
Experts reckon raw Pu-erh tea achieves its peak taste at 60 years which means if you want a really smashing cup of raw Pu-Erh, you’d ideally want something that was grown before the first moon landing. Admittedly that will set you back a few thousand nicker and such teas are unlikely to be popping up in the tea review section of this website any time soon.
All Pu-Erh and Dark Tea reviews
Conclusion
So there you have it. A brief introduction to the six major tea types. This is really just a starting point to understanding tea. Obviously not all green teas are the same nor are all black teas the same or any other tea types on this list. There are as many different flavours of tea as there are, well, teas. The post-plucking withering and panning and what-have-you is just one factor in the infinite variety of tastes that are achieved from the hard-working Camelia Sinensis plant.
Brilliant post! Very informative and well written. I’ll definitely be referring to it when someone asks me a tea related question again 👍🏻
Thank you! I am planning to include more informative-type articles here so if you have any suggestions for what I should cover next, please let me know!