What are the differences between green tea and black tea? There are four main types of tea commonly found on the market: black tea, oolong tea, green tea and white tea. All of them are made using leaves from the same plant, Camellia Sinensis, but the leaves are processed differently to produce each type of tea.
Black tea is traditionally the most popular of the four in western countries, although green tea is now catching up in terms of popularity, since knowledge of its many health benefits is becoming more widely known. Black tea differs from the others because it goes through a process of oxidization. The leaves are first withered, so that the moisture content is reduced by up to 70%, making them limp and easily rolled – the rolling is usually done by machinery, forcing them to crack open so that the enzymes within are exposed to oxygen. Oxidization then occurs – basically, the chemical reaction that takes place changes the properties of the leaves, and also darkens the colour from green to various shades of brown, depending on how long they are allowed to oxidize. The leaves are then dried to complete the process. Oolong tea, then, is somewhere in between black tea and green tea, in that the leaves do go through the oxidization process, but are stopped before they go as far as black tea. It is said that oolong tea was invented by accident, when a man named Wu Lung (hence the tea name) became distracted on his return from a day of tea picking. By the time he remembered about the leaves he'd gathered, they had already begun to oxidize, and so oolong tea was born! Thanks.
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