REGIONS OF HIGH-GROWN TEAS
High-grown tea is found at elevations of 4,000 to 6,500 feet and comprises approximately 25 percent of the harvest. These teas are the finest that Sri Lanka produces—leafy, stylish teas that have distinct personalities, golden color, fragrant aromas, and brisk full-bodied flavor. The perfect conditions found at these elevations provide the right environment for the bushes to grow more slowly, concentrating the flavor in fewer rather than more shoots.
West Highlands. Dimbula is perhaps the most famous of Sri Lanka’s tea regions. Here, in the western part of the central highlands, tea grows at 3,500 to 5,000 feet. Influenced by its rich tropical soil, Dimbula tea has a strong, distinctive personality. Lush rainforest, dense jungles, and breathtaking waterfalls surround many of these gardens, adding contrast to the rich green tapestry of tea bushes covering the hillsides and valleys. These gardens are perfectly situated to take advantage of the changing wind patterns that blow over the island, which bring both much needed sun and rain to the bushes.
The best Dimbulas are picked in the dry season of January, February, and March. During these months, while the annual northeast monsoon is drenching the northern and eastern side of the island with rain, Dimbula and the rest of the western side are blessed with cool, clear days and bright sunshine. These aromatic teas have long thin leaves and a fine, clear, and bright character in the cup, with strong, distinctive aromas and rich full-bodied flavors. Dimbula is comprised of eight subdistricts: Agarapatana, Bogawantalawa, Hatton/Dickoya, Nanu Oya/Lindula/Talawakelle, Patana/Kotagala, Punduloya, Ramboda, and Upcot/Maskeliya. Each of these subdistricts features unique microclimates among the blanketing hills and lush valleys that coddle the bushes while adding distinction to the tea leaves. Look for Dimbula tea from the following gardens: Bogahawatte, Bogawantalawa, Diyagama, Kenilworth, Kew, Kirkoswald, Loinorn, Nadoototen, Norwood, Pettiagalla, Somerset, St. Clair, and Strathspey.
Central Highlands. Nuwara Eliya teas grow at over 6,000 feet, the highest elevation for Ceylon teas. Nuwara Eliya lies at the foot of Pidurutalagala (8,280 feet), the highest mountain in Sri Lanka. The area is a high plateau ringed by hills and mountains. Nuwara Eliya teas yield a light, mellow cup that is exquisitely floral, redolent of apricots and peaches, and golden in color. They vie with Darjeeling tea as being some of the most exquisite in the world. Here, in misty mountain valleys, the best tea is plucked from gardens that are laid out in patchwork patterns of undulating rows, interspersed with shade trees. The scent of wild mint, eucalyptus, and cypress trees waft in the air across the landscape. In many places the incline of the hills pitches on a precipitous gradient, yet the tea pickers rarely seem bothered by these steep inclines.
Like Dimbulas, the best Nuwara Eliya teas are picked in the cooler, dry seasonal quality months of January, February, and March. On the road from Kandy to Nuwara Eliya the Labookellie tea factory offers tourists the opportunity to observe tea processing firsthand. Look for estate tea from these Nuwara Eliya gardens: Court Lodge, Delmar, Inverness, Kenmare, Mackwoods/Labookellie, Mahagastotte/Lover’s Leap, Pedro, Tommagong, and Wataalia.
Eastern Highlands. Uva region stretches from 2,800 to 6,000 feet in elevation. Uva teas grow on the easternmost slopes of the central mountains and are known for their pronounced, concentrated flavor, coppery red color, and distinctive mellow aroma. The Uva district seasonal quality period is June through September, yielding a much anticipated summer crop. During this time as the southwest monsoons impact the island’s southern and western regions, a hot wind called the Cachan blows down from the northeast into Uva and Uda Pussellawa. The tea bushes respond to this hot, dry air by closing up their leaves, literally turning inward against the merciless wind. This response is as if they were faced with a drought, so the bushes initiate a chemical change within the cells of the leaves to replace lost moisture.
As a result of this harsh weather, which can last for six to eight weeks, Uva teas are especially flavorful during this time and thus command high prices. Uva has eight subdistricts located at various elevations: Bandarawela/Poonagala, Demodera/Hali-Ela/Badulla, Ella/Namunukula, Haputale, Koslanda/Haldummulla, Madulsima, Malwatte/Welimada, and Passara/Lunugala. Look for teas from these Uva gardens: Ambagasdowa, Dyraaba, Koslanda, Pettiagalla, Rooketanne, and St. James.
Uda Pussellawa. This small region in the eastern part of Sri Lanka lies north of Uva and east of Nuwara Eliya. Uda Pussellawa experiences the dry Cachan winds from July to September, which bring the best-quality tea season and rosy, thirst-quenching tea. In the westernmost parts of Uda Pussellawa the tea gardens are somewhat protected from the worst of the December-to-March monsoons, allowing Uda Pussellawa to produce seasonal quality teas from January to March, which coincides with the seasonal quality periods in Nuwara Eliya and Dimbula. This tea is less flavorful than the summer pluckings but is still bright and brisk in the cup. Uda Pussellawa has two main subdistricts: Maturata and Ragala/Halgranoya.
REGIONS OF MID-LEVEL TEAS
Mid-level teas grow at 2,500 to 4,000 feet and account for 16 percent of the annual harvest. Mid-level teas are rich and mouth-filling, with good flavor and a clear, pleasing reddish-gold color.
Central Highlands. Kandy is located not too far from Polonnaruwa, the ancient capital of Ceylon. Scottish planter James Taylor started some of the first tea gardens in this area in 1867. Here tea shares the land with cinnamon and cacao production. Since the mid-1990s, however, tea production has declined in parts of this region as soil erosion problems have led to reduced productivity. Kandy teas are substantial and strong in flavor and have dark, large, full leaves. Ceylon tea blends often rely on Kandy teas to boost the strength and contribute depth to the flavor. Many Kandy estates produce fine-leaf world-class teas with exceptional fragrance and complex flavors.
In Hantane, a few miles from Kandy, the Ceylon Tea Museum opened in January 2002, not too far from the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens. Visitors to Sri Lanka who are interested in learning more about the tea will find these two places worth a visit. Kandy is the largest of the regions and contains many subdistricts, although the two most notable ones are Matale and Pussellawa/Hewaheta. Look for seasonal quality tea in February and March from the following gardens: Adawatte, Blairmond, Hellbodde, Kenilworth, Loolecondera, Melfort, and St. James.
REGIONS OF LOW-GROWN TEAS
Low-grown teas are found mostly in the southern region, from sea level to 2,500 feet, but these teas comprise the largest share of Sri Lanka’s total production, at 55 percent. Low-grown teas are the fastest growing, producing an abundance of large leaves at the expense of concentrated flavor.
The southern coast and Rhunua tea. Ruhuna teas from Sri Lanka’s southwestern region thrive in fertile soils and warm, humid temperatures. From Galle to Ratnapura tea grows easily, and growers excel in producing large, leafy, sometimes very tippy teas. Particular soil conditions yield a dark, nearly black leaf, and many of the southern teas have nice, well-proportioned leaves. But without the flavor-enhancing benefit of cooling breezes from high-altitude locales, these teas lack finesse, briskness, and distinct clarity of flavor. The largest market for Ruhuna tea is Russia and the Middle East, where tea drinkers seek the punch of a full-bodied, strong flavored tea to drink alone, and the European market, where small amounts of these are added to Ceylon tea blends for strength.
Ruhuna has four main subdistricts: Deniyaya, Galle, Matara, and Ratnapura/Balangoda. Look for tea from the following gardens: Berubeula, Ceycilian, Dellawa, Galaboda, and Uruwela.
TEA REPLACES COFFEE AS SRI LANKA’S MAIN CROP
Tea became a major crop in Sri Lanka only at the end of the nineteenth century. Tea is not indigenous to Sri Lanka; it was brought to the island by the enterprising English. The tea crop later came to prominence when a series of disastrous coffee blights starting in 1869 infected Ceylon’s prosperous coffee crop, subsequently destroying the coffee trees. The disease Hemileia vastatrix afflicted the underside of the leaves of the coffee trees with orange
blotches. Tea cultivation allowed Ceylon’s coffee planters to begin rebuilding their devastated economy. First the Portuguese, then the Dutch, and finally the English held sway over the fortunes of this island formerly known as Ceylon. Primarily trading for cinnamon, cacao, exotic woods, and gemstones, these Western traders left their mark on Sri Lanka.
Beginning with the Portuguese invasion in 1505, Ceylon passed over to Dutch rule in 1658, then to partial British rule in 1796, and ultimately to complete British rule by 1802. At this time local people had been growing coffee on the island for at least a hundred years. Large and small coffee gardens populated the island. Realizing the cash potential this crop could have in this lush paradise, the English cleared land in the virgin jungle in record numbers between 1830 and 1845; they developed new coffee plantations in Dimbula, Kandy, and Nuwara Eliya.
But the English also brought tea and their social customs of drinking tea with them to Ceylon. The Dutch, who had been instrumental in the establishment of tea throughout Indonesia and Taiwan, had tried to cultivate tea in Ceylon, but their experiments had failed. The English introduced the local Singhalese to the daily ritual of tea drinking. The Ceylon ruling class, desirous to retain their former elite status with the new rulers, quickly began to win favor with the English by emulating proper English ways. They adopted the quirks of the English lifestyle, including the social rituals of drinking tea by observing morning and afternoon teatime.
Tea seed was imported from China in 1824 and from Assam in 1839 for experimental purposes and grown in the Botanical Gardens of Peradeniya and Nuwara Eliya on an experimental basis. It was not until the 1860s, however, when Solomon and Gabriel de Worms planted some China tea seed in Labookellie Garden in the Nuwara Eliya district and Scotsman James Taylor experimented with Assam tea seed on Loolecondera Garden in the Hewaheta district in Kandy, that the door opened for serious tea production.
Fear of even worse coffee blights resulted in the creation of many new tea estates, extending the range for tea production to Dimbula and Uda Pussellawa. In 1875 the final blow of Hemileia vastatrix was felt throughout the remaining coffee farms, and thousands of acres of coffee trees were ripped out of the ground. Tea gardens were planted in their place. With the entire agricultural industry in ruin, the coffee planters suffered many years of financial hardship before resurrecting their new tea industry. Perhaps the cruelest blow came when dead coffee trees were salvaged for wood and sent back to England to be turned into legs for tea tables. That year the total acreage planted with tea was 10,000 acres. Just ten years later, in 1885, 48,000 acres were under cultivation, and by 1900 the number was up to 300,000 acres. Today the total cultivated tea extent is approximately 481,855 acres.
Table 4.4. Grading System for Ceylon Teas
Detailed list to follow
Orthodox Leaf Grades (90 Percent of Production)
Silver Tips
OP:Orange Pekoe
FBOP:Flowery Broken Orange Pekoe
BOP 1:Broken Orange Pekoe One
Pekoe
Broken Grades (4 Percent of Production)
BOP:Broken Orange Pekoe
BOPF:Broken Orange Pekoe Fannings (the most commonly used orthodox grade for teabag packing)
Dust 1
FBOPF Ex. Sp.:Flowery Broken Orange Pekoe Fannings Extra Special
FBOPF 1:Flowery Broken Orange Pekoe Fannings One
CTC Grades (6 Percent of Production)
BP 1:Broken Pekoe One
PF 1:Pekoe Fannings One (the most commonly used CTC grade for teabag packing)
TEA PRODUCTION IN SRI LANKA
Bringing a delicious and fragrant tea to market requires a joint effort among the tea estate manager, the tea factory manager, the tea pluckers, and the factory workers. Unlike the myriad leaf configurations plucked in China, Ceylon teas are always plucked as a flush (two leaves and a bud). Tea is collected in baskets or cloth sacks that loosely contain the freshly plucked leaf. For the finest teas the baskets or sacks are never filled but emptied several times a day to avoid bruising the tea leaves under excess weight. A skilled plucker can pick nearly sixty pounds of tea a day and is usually paid on the weight of tea delivered at day’s end. This quantity of plucked leaf yields approximately sixteen pounds of drinkable tea, a ratio of nearly five to one. Depending on the altitude of the tea garden, plucking is repeated in each garden every seven to fourteen days throughout the year.
As in all tea-producing countries, the plucked leaves are collected and brought to the factory to begin processing. Unlike the early teas in Ceylon, which were rolled by hand on floors and then fired over charcoal fires, today’s tea is controlled by a combination of machinery and firsthand experience. Because weather conditions vary so greatly in Sri Lanka, tea managers must know how to interpret and adjust for changes in the weather to bring out the best flavor in their teas. Most tea in Sri Lanka is produced by the orthodox method. After withering the leaves, the shoots are rolled to rupture the cell walls, thus beginning the internal process of cellular change and leaf oxidation. CTC teas are cut and torn in an unorthodox manner, to achieve finely cut leaf particles.
Ceylon teas are graded by size, which makes it easy for tea buyers to ascertain a particular leaf size and style of tea. Grading is not necessarily an indication of quality. Ceylon teas are also marketed by region and district, as blends or estate-specific teas. All genuine Ceylon tea carries the logo of the Sri Lanka Tea Board, which is the stamp mark of a stylized lion holding a sword.
Indonesia: Java, Sumatra, and Sulawesi
Once known as the Dutch East Indies, the Indonesian islands of Java, Sumatra, and Sulawesi are part of the Malay Archipelago. Indonesia is comprised of more than 14,000 islands scattered over a distance of 3,100 miles. Indonesia supports numerous peoples, languages, religions, and cultures, and in the diversity of its island flora and fauna, a small but thriving tea industry. Long before the English East Indies Company arrived in China seeking luxurious silks, porcelains, and tea, Portuguese traders in quest of caches of prized exotic pepper from the Malabar Coast in India arrived in the Molucca Islands—the fabled Spice Islands—in 1513.
Before the Portuguese, the source of cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg was the exclusive haunt of Arab traders who, with the help of Egyptian facilitators, controlled the European market for spices through Venice. Arab traders in Venice are believed to have introduced pre-Renaissance Venetians to tea in the sixteenth century. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries such opulent goods as spices, silks, carpets, majolica, glassware, and lacquer began to flow into Europe across the Silk Road, not just from China but also from eastern markets in Egypt, Turkey, and Persia.
With the arrival of the Portuguese in the Molucca Islands via the route around the Cape of Good Hope, this once secret sea route was revealed. This occurrence changed the history of merchant trading in the East Indies from one of Arab dominance to one of European dominance in a few short years. The stream of Portuguese-controlled spices into Europe undercut the price the Arabs charged by more than half. The opportunity to satisfy demand for costly spices, once a precious luxury afforded only by the richest citizens, became a siren song too intoxicating for Spanish and Dutch traders to ignore. The Spanish reached Molucca in 1522, and by 1602 the Dutch, sailing as the Dutch East Indies Company, had sent four ships to the East Indies, where they formed a collection depot at Batavia on Java for collecting and packing Oriental goods headed back home. The Dutch East Indies Company (known as the VOC, or Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie in Dutch) was an association of merchants that became the most ruthless player in the spice market and the eventual master of the East Indies trade in Indonesia for the next three hundred years.
The great age of trade routes and European supremacy in global trading had begun. Although the Portuguese were the first European traders to bring tea to Europe, the Dutch ultimately dominated tea imports into Europe. From their position in the Indonesian islands the Dutch began to trade with China, Japan, and Macao. They bo
ught tea from both China and Japan and sent it to their collection point in Java. From there, the tea was sent to Amsterdam and distributed. By 1610 the Dutch were sending regular shipments of tea from Amsterdam to France, Holland, and the Baltic coast. The Dutch would keep their fierce lock on tea imports to Europe until the English overcame their position in 1669.
Record of the first tea planted on Java by the Dutch occurred in 1684, with tea seeds procured in Japan from China tea bush. Government-established tea gardens were only barely successful—the plants lived but they did not thrive—and tea cultivation in Java languished until around 1835. Perhaps inspired by the success of the British with tea in Assam, the Dutch began to explore tea cultivation on Java with a renewed degree of seriousness. Dutch tea planters eager to take up the challenge of a lucrative cash crop convinced the Dutch government to give up sole control of the tea industry. The Dutch tea planters realized, as the British did in India, that perhaps the China bush tea plants were not the right cultivar of tea bush for the soil and climate conditions the island offered. The tea planters secured tea seed from Assam bushes in India, and it did not take long for the bushes to flourish in the steamy, tropical climate.
Tea cultivation at last became successful on Java in 1878. Modern tea withering techniques were introduced, and positive reception to the tea’s quality and flavor from Europeans established Java tea in a class with Ceylon and British Indian teas. The Dutch expanded tea production onto Sumatra in the early 1900s. Java is Indonesia’s most important tea-producing island, followed by Sumatra and Sulawesi. Before the Japanese invasion in 1942, Indonesia had risen to become the world’s fourth-largest tea producer. The strategic position of the Indonesian archipelago during World War II had a negative effect on the tea industry, and production was affected for many decades. The condition of the tea factories fell into benign neglect, and the gardens became overgrown and wild.
The Story of Tea Page 28