Do you have teas that have been sitting on your shelf for so long that they lost their aroma and flavor? Or maybe, sometimes you want to mix different teas to blend a new flavor? Here are some simple ways to roast your own tea in your own kitchen.

One way to process tealeaves is to roast them. Roasting reduces the water content of the tealeaves at their primary process, it also lowers the amount of impure content resulted from the lengthy tea-making process. Roasted tealeaves are more stable in fragrance and quality and are able to be preserved better for a longer period of time.

Use one of the following roasting tools to roast your tea:

Rice cooker:

Place water-absorbent paper in a rice cooker. The amount of tealeaves roasted in the cooker cannot exceed 0.5 cm in height. Do not cover the rice cooker fully, leave some space so that steam can go vaporized. Do not add water in the rice cooker and keep the cooker in the heat-preserving mode when roasting. It takes at least 3 to 4 hours before tealeaves change when roasted in a rice cooker. But the plus side is, it is easy to clean a rice cooker and it produces less odor; also, roasting tea in a rice cooker does not change tealeaves so rapidly that tealeaves might get ruined in just a blink of the eye when left unattended.

Oven:

Your oven should not have the smell of BBQ meat or cakes. Place water-absorbent paper in an oven. The amount of tealeaves roasted in the oven cannot exceed 0.5 cm in height. Preheat your oven to 80℃. Remember to stir and toss tealeaves frequently. Tealeaves are expected to change in 10 minutes and you can start tasting your tea now. An oven is good in that it takes shorter time for tealeaves to change, but that also means tealeaves undergo a more drastic change when roasted in an oven and are more easily to get burned.

Professional tealeaves roasting oven:

Don’t forget to stir and toss tealeaves so that they can be roasted evenly. Be gentle when you stir so that you can avoid the smell of scorching resulted from the tea dust that fall into the oven and got burned.

Heat induced from roasting changes the impure contents, tannin and catechuic acid in tealeaves. This change lowers the bitter and acerbic tastes and brings out the sweetness in the tealeaves.

The changes of tea are defined by the changes in their bitter and sweet tastes. It is not difficult to roast tea and I encourage you to give it a go. Roast just a small amount of tealeaves each time you try, and I am sure you will get the result you love the most. Just do it! You might not roast your tea to its perfection, but the taste of imperfection itself is just equally worth exploring.

Roast at 60℃ for about an hour and you will see obvious changes in tealeaves.

Making your tea with water at the temperature of 95℃

The color of tea changes after you heat them up.

After sitting the roasted tealeaves for a few days (We called it awakening tea), the fragrance of the tea gets stronger.