Summer
Summer is the year's most productive picking and its least prized. Fast growth in strong sun makes a leaf heavy in catechins and light in amino acids, which is to say brisk, astringent and cheap, and most of the world's everyday tea comes from it.
- Window
- June to September
- Vocabulary
- The plain seasons
- Growth
- Fastest, in strong sun
- Cup
- Brisk, astringent, simple
The tea year
Typical windows, not dates. Every one of these moves with the weather, the latitude and the year: the pages say by how much.
Winter crosses new year, so its window is drawn as two bars.
What it is
The pickings taken through the hot months, between the spring harvest and the autumn one. Because the bush grows quickly in the heat, this is where volume comes from: a garden may take several rounds through summer, and in the estate systems this is the monsoon flush, the round between the second and the autumnal that is rarely sold under its own name. Most blended, bagged and commodity tea is summer leaf.
When it happens
June through September in the northern hemisphere, and the reverse south of the equator. In monsoon regions the rains dominate the period and matter more than the heat: heavy rain produces fast, water-swollen growth and the year's most dilute leaf.
What it does to the leaf
Strong light and warmth drive photosynthesis hard, and the plant converts amino acids into catechins as it grows. The theanine that gives a spring picking its sweetness is comparatively scarce, and the polyphenols that give tea its bite are abundant. Fast growth also means a larger, more mature, less concentrated leaf. Every part of this runs opposite to the spring chemistry.
What it tastes like
Brisk, astringent and simple, with body but not much sweetness or aroma. Left to itself it can be harsh. It is not, however, a wasted harvest: briskness is exactly what a tea needs to stand up to milk, to survive being bagged, and to carry a blend, which is why summer leaf is the base of essentially every breakfast tea and why the strength people associate with a strong cup of tea is a summer characteristic.
How to read it on a label
It is almost never printed, for the obvious reason. A tea sold with no harvest information at a low price is usually summer leaf, and that is a perfectly honest product rather than a deception. Where you do see summer named, it tends to be a producer being transparent about a range, or occasionally a genuine speciality: some Taiwanese and Fujian producers make deliberate summer oolongs, and the heavily insect-bitten Taiwanese Oriental Beauty is a summer tea by necessity, because the leafhoppers it depends on are a summer insect.
What people get wrong
Treating summer leaf as a failure rather than a different tool. A spring gyokuro would be ruined by milk and useless in a builder's mug; summer leaf is built for exactly that. The practical error is under-brewing it out of caution, which leaves it thin and sour without removing the astringency, when a shorter, hotter and stronger brew gets the best out of it.
Teas defined by this picking
Where this term is used
More in this tradition
