Processing
Every tea is the same leaf taken through a different sequence of operations, and this section works through those operations one at a time. Twelve step pages say what each one does to the leaf, what it tastes like afterwards and where it is usually misread. Six shorter pages start from a question you might already be holding and hand you to the step that answers it.
What it is
Two tiers and one chain. The step pages are the reference, in the order this section reads them: plucking, withering, bruising, oxidation, kill-green, shaping, yellowing, drying, roasting, wet-piling, aging and sorting. One page each, so a claim about a step lives at one address instead of being restated on every tea that uses it. The problem pages are the way in when you do not yet know which step you are asking about.
What people get wrong
Reading a chain as a checklist. No tea gets all twelve, and the order is not fixed: Japanese green usually skips the wither, most black tea has no separate kill-green, and a pressed puerh is sorted in the middle of its sequence rather than at the end. A missing row more often means the work happened inside a neighbouring step than that it never happened at all.
Where the boundary blurs
The chain is a reading order rather than a set of separate stages. Processing is better seen as a continuum than as a distinct set of steps, and several of the twelve are one continuous change looked at from different points: a wither is already a slow oxidation, a black tea's drying is also its kill-green, and one pass of rolling can bruise and shape the leaf at once. The twelve exist so each operation can be explained once. No leaf experiences twelve boundaries.
