by Jeff Koehler
“When you are fermenting or oxidizing teas, there are the two aspects of the cup [you are looking for],” Sanjay Sharma explained one second flush morning in the Glenburn factory. Bright, glary light flooded in through the large windows, giving the wooden floor beams, polished from wear, the clean shine on an old dance hall. “Firstly, you’ve got the texture, the mouth feel.” This is the body, the briskness. “And then you’ve got the aroma and flavor.” He held his two index fingers together and moved them up and down in parallel. “It’s a different set of compounds that are working, simultaneously, towards, say, flavor and texture.” He began to move his hands as if juggling billiard balls. “But they don’t always move together, you know?”
Sanjay talks quickly and peppers his sentences with you know, yeah, and okay. These seem less like questions—even rhetorical—than a way of letting the listener catch up.
“You might have a tea that you know has an exceptional nose, a good flavor. But it might be very thin in the cup,” he continued. This is in part because aroma compounds develop earlier in the process. “And then you want that ‘perfect cup.’ You want that flavor and you want that body … it doesn’t always happen, okay. So you have to decide what you want to highlight.” It’s about trade-offs. “The elusive ‘perfect cup,’” he said later, almost wistfully. “It doesn’t exist.”
These natural products are not industrial. Nothing is certain in making them. The materials are continually changing, their reaction never fully predictable. “Making tea,” Sanjay said one autumn evening on the verandah of Glenburn’s old planter’s bungalow, “is like calling your shots on a pool table.”
Once leaves are judged to have reached their fermentation peak, workers quickly tip them into the dryer’s hopper to inactivate the enzymes and microorganisms at work. By removing the moisture with heat, fermentation is stopped, and flavors get sealed in.
The dryers are boxy and oversize rectangular machines six or eight feet tall and twice as long that surely looked futuristic a century—even a half century—ago. A conveyor belt slowly zigzags from top to bottom for twenty to thirty minutes in about 240-degree-Fahrenheit air. Looking through one of the small, smoked-glass windows in the side of the dryer as the tea slides by under a red lightbulb feels more like peering into a darkroom than an oven. The last of the moisture gets wicked away—the final moisture content is only 2 percent—before the tea cascades into a trough at the bottom front of the dryer.
As with any baking, the duration can’t be too long nor the temperature too hot, or the tea gets overly crisp or simply dried out. This gives the liquor an unpleasant baked flavor or even stronger burnt one. While it depends on the flush and the climate and even the elevation of the garden, times are specific. “It is precisely twenty-three minutes,” a factory manager on Makaibari said during the first flush. “Not twenty-two, not twenty-four.” At the end of the second flush, with larger leaves, stronger brews, and more humid conditions (the rains had just begun), the time had been increased to—precisely—twenty-six minutes. At Namring in the Teesta Valley, 2013 first flush teas fired at 230 degrees Fahrenheit for twenty minutes, but as the leaves became coarser and could handle a harder wither and a harder roll, both time and temperature gradually increased. Second flush ones got twenty-three minutes at 250 degrees Fahrenheit, and autumn ones twenty-five minutes at 255.
From the trough, the tea is lifted out using a white-bladed shovel with the type of wide, curved scoop used for clearing snow. A bin of still-warm and slightly brittle leaves exudes lovely, toasty, lightly caramelized aromas and carries a heightened smell of tea in the same way that warm loaves fresh from a baker’s oven carry an intensified scent of bread.
When hot water is poured over the leaves in a teapot, they will release their vibrant and lively flavors of the flushing hills that were trapped by the burst of heat.
Or those of death? Always the contrarian opining to a different tune, Rajah Banerjee offered an alternative take in the Makaibari tasting room: “Fermentation is simply a process of death and decay. We are afraid of death—but love the flavor of it.” Along with the green flies feasting on second flush leaves, for him this is another “where there is life, there is death” dichotomy. Firing the leaves in this deep state of oxidation, when fermenting flavors are at their ripest, he said with a mischievous expression, “kills the process of death and seals it.”
The last stage in the factory is sorting and grading the tea. The four categories, in descending order of size, are whole leaf, broken leaf, fannings, and dust. The last two are used to fill tea bags. Most Darjeeling gardens aim for 60 or 70 percent leaf-grade tea.
Whole-leaf teas are graded using a string of letters—essentially, the more the better—that refer to the size of the processed leaf, rather than the quality or flavor of the tea. The highest level is FTGFOP, which stands for “Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe.” (Tippy means a generous amount of sought-after whole-leaf tips. Orange pekoe describes large-leafed tea.) Wits say, though, that the acronym means “Far Too Good for Ordinary People.”
On occasion the acronym gets a prefix and/or a suffix. An S is added at the beginning for “superfine” and a 1 at the end to show the highest possible grade: SFTGFOP–1. These are exalted teas.
Sorting is usually done both mechanically and by hand. Vibrating machines bounce the leaves down a narrow, slightly pitched ramp as the tea falls through gaps into a series of bins by size. Hand sorting is similar, but more gentle (not to mention quieter), using flat, round trays.
Glenburn estate does all its sorting by hand. Using a set of metal trays with progressively smaller square perforations, a dozen women sit in a quiet, sunny corner of the factory and swirl and shake a handful of tea at a time. The smaller particles fall through the perforations while the women pick out any debris, stalks, or twigs. It’s dusty, tedious work.
While men generally perform every other factory step, sorting is done strictly by women. “They have delicate hands,” Vijay Dhancholia at Marybong explained. Other managers across Darjeeling give the identical answer.
Once sorted, tea is set aside by leaf type, even garden section, until there is enough to make an invoice, about 150 kilograms (330 pounds). Sometimes batches of similar types are blended to balance out the flavors. Once the invoice is complete, the tea gets packed.
Traditionally tea goes into wooden tea chests edged with tin and lined with foil to keep the leaves from absorbing odors or moisture. Measuring about twenty-four by sixteen by sixteen inches, they remain ideal for the finest, largest leaf-grade teas and protect against breakage during shipping. Most tea now, though, gets packed into hefty, foil-lined brown-paper sacks that hold about twenty-five kilograms (fifty-five pounds) of tea. This is often at the request of buyers, who find it easier to store them than unwieldy wooden boxes.
Hand-inking on the chests or sacks using stencils conveys all of the details of production, including leaf grade, date of processing, and total weight of the tea.
They also carry the official medallion-shaped logo of Darjeeling tea. Created in 1983, it’s a bold green-and-white, stylized rendering of an Indian plucker in profile, with a round earring, nose stud, and Picasso-like almond-shaped eye, who is holding between thumb and forefinger, two leaves and a bud. The word DARJEELING curls around the gap to complete the circular design.
At the gardens, the chests and the sacks are loaded daily onto trucks and sent to warehouses down in Kolkata, the center of the tea industry. Still fresh leaves on a bush only the morning before, the tea is now destined for the cups and palates of distinguished tea drinkers around the world.
* * *
* The sheds also occasionally shelter animals. During the first flush on Makaibari, pluckers discovered a nine-foot-long king cobra curled in the rafters of one station. One of the forest rangers who patrols Makaibari’s woodlands caught it with his hands and carried it to the edge of a forested area of the estate to release it away from the houses.
CHAPTER 8
A Decision for the Mouth to Make
Tasting tea has all of the complexities and subtleties of tasting wine. Even more so. The liquor gets sampled at varying temperatures as it cools. Dry tea leaves are looked over, felt, and smelled, as well as damp ones. (Somewhat confusing to the outsider, the infused leaves are called the infusion.) Harvesting and production take place daily for nine months, with the tea changing a little each day as the leaves progress through a daisy chain of four flushes.
While Darjeeling teas are tasted at various times by various people before reaching the customer, daily batch tastings in the factory of freshly processed teas are an integral part of the tea making—rather than the buying or selling. Tastings happen, without exception, six days a week. (With no plucking on Sunday, that means no processing or tasting on Mondays.) Done generally in the late morning but always by afternoon, when the natural light begins to fade, the ritual of sampling tea just fired that same day has changed little over the decades.
A medium-size garden might do ten to twenty batches in a day, depending on the flush (November, for instance, sees significantly less tea than July). A batch usually runs between 100 to 160 kilograms (220 to 350 pounds) of finished tea that has been withered, rolled, fermented, and fired together. From each batch, a small amount is tasted. Gardens are looking at quality and consider what to improve, adjusting to the continually shifting conditions of the weather and leaves.
“We do it to see what we can do better,” said Vijay Dhancholia at Marybong. “It’s for tomorrow’s batches.” While his heavy mustache has gone a touch gray and his hair begun to thin during almost forty years of working on tea estates in Darjeeling, his daily tastings remain unchanged and fundamental to his work as a tea maker. Each day, alongside the factory manager, he closely samples the batches that have been withered overnight and processed that morning.
Estates have a tasting room set aside. Marybong’s is in a corner of the factory, like an attached, glassed-walled office. So is Glenburn’s, though it’s right at the entrance of the building. In Castleton’s, various certifications, framed newspaper articles, and four world-record certificates it achieved between 1989 and 1992 hang on the wall above stacks of upturned tasting cups. Goomtee’s tasting room is separated from the sorting room by a door and looks out over a deep cleft of hills. Jungpana’s is a couple of steps away, among offices perched on a blunt precipice above the valley below. The tasting room at Makaibari is in the top of a small, two-story building facing the factory, whose shiny silver-and-green roof dominates the view and whose steady hum pierces the windows. At Thurbo it’s a separate hut, with shiny white tiles and wood paneling giving it the feel of a bar in a slightly outdated European ski resort.
Each of these rooms is uncluttered, painted in white, and contains a long, white-tiled counter that is a touch over waist high so the taster need not unduly bend over. Above is a wall of north-facing windows that provide good, even light, the kind that portrait photographers look for, or those shooting food for cookbooks: steady, clean, and diffused, offering balanced, true colors. Such light is important since tasting tea is as much about using the eyes as the nose and mouth.
A half hour or so before the tasting begins, an assistant begins setting out small infusion pots and cups in a straight line along the counter, one pair for each of the day’s batches. The white porcelain cups show off best a tea’s color when “cupping” it, as professionals call tea tasting. The white rims have been worn down, revealing earthy, reddish clay beneath the glaze. But they are spotlessly clean, with no trace of residual odors. Faint cracks stained black from years of tea spread around the inside of the cups like a fine netting.
The infusion pots are white, ceramic, and individual-size and hold, if filled to the brim, 180 ml (¾ cup) of liquid. Most are small, handleless pitchers with short spouts and a fitted lid with an inset rim, Indian-made and bought in one of the wholesale shops on a side street near the Tea Board of India headquarters in Kolkata. The other style, made in Sri Lanka, is more expensive but smoother. Instead of a spout, these have five sharp, V-shaped notches like the jagged teeth of a Halloween pumpkin carved by a seven-year-old. The matching cups of both versions are almost perfectly spherical and also without handles, akin to small, white tea bowls.
A foil packet or a little, round metal tin behind each holds a small amount of dry leaf. Lying atop the leaves is a slip of paper that identifies by number and letter codes the batch, grade, leaf type, and amounts. These can be checked in a ledger to find out the section of origin in the garden and the precise timings of withering, rolling, fermentation, and firing.
With an electric silver kettle filled and heating, the assistant takes a portable, brass, handheld balance scale and begins working down the line of infusion pots like Lady Justice, measuring out a generous pinch of dry tea leaves in one tray so that it equals the weight of the other, which holds an old Indian twenty-five-paise coin weighing precisely 2.5 grams (just a touch over one twelfth of an ounce, or a smidge more than an American dime), the customary counterbalance across Darjeeling.
Once each of the pots has its exact measure of dry leaf and the kettle reaches a boil, the assistant pours 150 ml (⅔ cup) water over the leaves and then covers the pots with their ceramic lids. An hourglass timer is turned over, and the tea is left to infuse as the sand drains though the narrow waist. Five minutes is standard. Some tasters, although preferring to steep for three to four minutes when preparing a cup at home, always test at this length of time.
The differences between the batches of tea during a single day are slight at best—but important. Weight, time, and amounts must be precise. Consistency is everything.
One by one, the liquors are poured out into the small, white tea bowls, the lid held tight with the fingers and the pot then propped horizontally into the bowl. The size is perfect: the infusion pot lies snugly in the bowl with the lid firmly pinched shut as it completely drains, with the trapped leaves acting as a natural strainer.
Going back to the beginning of the row, the assistant places the pots upright and checks the liquors in the bowls to see if any leaves have escaped. As these would continue to strengthen the brew, the liquor gets drained into a clean cup if needed. Each cup now holds tea quite similar in tone.
By the time the tea has been cupped, the manager and assistant manager, and perhaps the factory or production managers, have gathered in the room.
Like his colleagues on gardens across Darjeeling, Dhancholia works from left to right in deft and brusque movements. He vigorously shakes the last of the liquid from the pitcher, spraying the wooden floor (and his shoes) with fine droplets of tea, then turns over the lid, which holds the wet leaves in a neat mound: the infusion. He sticks his nose into the warm, limp leaves to take in the full range of aromas, from sweet and malty to fruity, lime blossom to tarry. In the infusion, he can gauge if the firing has been right. Acrid notes, burnt tones, and stewiness indicate that the firing has been too hot or too long, with too much moisture zapped from the overtoasted leaf. The reversed pot lid is set on top of the infuser pot, displaying the damp leaves.
The dry leaf is also examined for the color—shades of grays, greens, and browns—and size of the rolled leaf. “The appearance tells you whether you’ve withered it right. It’ll tell you if you’ve rolled right,” explained Sanjay Sharma at Glenburn during a warm but drizzly late-second flush tasting. “You want that twist and style.” He held a handful of dry leaf on a stiff sheet of white cardboard and sifted a pinch through his fingers. He snapped the cardboard taunt a couple of times, making the leaves dance while checking their sort. A loud, vintage air-raid siren sounded across the estate. The lunch break was over. A number of pluckers carrying faded umbrellas passed by the tasting-room window en route to a field just below the factory. “It will tell you if you sorted it right. Sorting is basically about size.” Part for quality and taste, part for aesthetics. “You don’t want your teas looking like long-grain basmati rice, you know,” he
said with a smile. “That would be boring.”
It’s also important to check what H. R. Chaudhary at Namring calls “the cleanness of leaf,” checking for any stems or twigs, as well as the percentages of tips (buds), for fine-plucking.
Again starting with the teas on the left, Dhancholia moves to the liquor itself. He is looking at its color, briskness, quality, and strength. After noting the shiny clarity and depth of color in the liquor, he takes in the aroma. He leans in close, nearly doubling over his tall frame, with one arm held tightly behind his back in the position of a speed skater. In the other hand he holds a large spoon like a pencil and stirs and splashes the liquid to get the aromas flying around. His nose is visibly sniffing in the various scents among waves of tea spilling over the rim as he moves from cup to cup in rapid succession down the line. Nothing in his actions is delicate—or haphazard. It’s messy, and the Rajasthan-born Dhancholia wears an apron made of a tight blue-and-white-check material like that of picnic tablecloths and a matching cap that comes down low on his forehead and sits like a moppy beret.
Finally, back at the first cup, he tastes the tea. He loudly slurps a generous mouthful of liquid off the spoon. Holding it for a moment, he takes two or three quick and sharp aerating sucks that flood the liquor around the palate and send it up into the olfactory organ in the nose in the manner of an animated wine taster. The tip of the tongue gauges sweetness and saltiness, the middle tartness, the back bitterness, and the back edges sourness. But he is also feeling the tea: the inside of the gums, cheeks, and the back of the tongue catch the astringency or pungency by sensation rather than taste. Tannins are responsible for the penny-brownish color of liquor and the astringency that gives tea its body and bite—its briskness. In a final exhale, Dhancholia spits out the mouthful of tea in a powerful stream into a tall, steel spittoon locally called a gaboon. He hesitates for a beat, gathering last impressions from the residual flavors on his palate, and then moves to the next. It’s all over in a few seconds. The mouth has registered the flavor, briskness (the opposite of flat or soft), pungency, and strength and caught any flaws.