What gets picked
Dark tea is picked coarse, and that is a deliberate choice rather than a compromise.
A typical pluck is 1 bud with 3 or 4 leaves, and often older leaf than that.
Yunnan material is large leaf by variety, which makes even a young pluck substantial.
Stem is not removed, because it has a job to do later in the process.
Brick teas carry a noticeable proportion of stem and mature leaf, sometimes about 15 per cent of the weight.
That looks like poor sorting to anyone trained on green tea, and it is the opposite of that.
Fine bud material is the wrong input here, and a pluck of tips would be a mistake.
Pickers take what the plant offers at that height, working down the branch rather than only the tip.
Machine harvesting is more acceptable in this category, since the standard tolerates it.
The result is a raw material that looks rough and is exactly right for what follows.
Judged by green tea rules it would be rejected outright, and that is precisely the point.
Why the standard exists
The reason is piling, the step that turns a green leaf into a dark tea.
Wet piling, or wo dui（渥堆）, heaps the leaf in tonnes and lets microbes work through it for weeks.
That heap needs air inside it, and fine leaf packs too tightly for air to move.
Stem and coarse leaf hold the heap open, which is why they are left in rather than sorted out.
Fine bud material also heats too fast in the heap and burns, giving a sour and dead tea.
Coarse leaf has the fibre that microbes break down slowly into the sweetness of a ripe tea.
The same logic governs ageing, since a compressed cake needs structure to change over decades.
A cake pressed from fine tips would simply sit there and would not mature in any useful way.
So the plucking standard here is about building a material that can be transformed.
Tender is the wrong virtue for this category, and maturity is what is actually being bought.
Grade follows the leaf
Grade in dark tea tracks the fineness of the material, but not in the direction people expect.
More bud and less stem generally means a higher grade, as it does everywhere else.
But stem is not treated as a defect here, and a complete absence of it can be a warning sign.
Graders look at evenness, at how much old leaf is present, and at the cleanliness of the lot.
Colour matters less than in other categories, since the material is meant to be dark.
Compression grade is judged by breaking the cake open rather than by looking at the outside.
A cake with fine material on the surface and coarse material inside is a well known trick.
Machine plucked material is common and acceptable, and it is graded on the same scale.
Grade says little about age, and an old cake made from poor material stays poor material.
Read the material rather than the grade, because the grade is only the producer’s opinion.
Break a cake open and look at the stem before you believe anything written on the wrapper.
Season and timing
Dark tea has the longest calendar of any category, because the leaf is picked and then kept.
Spring gives the finest material, and sun dried spring leaf is what most raw cakes are made from.
Summer and autumn leaf is coarser, and much of it goes into ripe tea where piling flattens the difference.
Rain during picking is a real problem, since sun drying is the only drying available.
Leaf picked in wet weather is often fire dried instead, and it never ages in the same way.
Sun drying also sets the moisture level that later decides whether a cake matures or spoils.
After that the calendar stretches out for years, and the timing that matters is storage, not harvest.
Ripe tea is piled within months of picking, while raw tea waits in cake form for a decade or more.
Both routes begin with the same decision about when the leaf came off the bush.
Spring leaf, dried in sun, is the material every serious dark tea wants to start from.