Tea for Two

Indian tea is of course famous. Most people know about Darjeeling and Assam and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), but the tea of Kerala is a little less known outside the country, despite the fact that every Tetley tea bag is full of Kerala tea.

Munnar is the hub of the industry in the state of Kerala, and where one can not only walk among tea plantations but also learn about the processing at the Tea Museum in the town, where thousands of plants were put in the ground, starting in 1880.

Our intrepid guide Sriraj has become a bit of an expert on tea, and when he knew we were interested he gave up his free afternoon to take us to the museum, and give us a private lesson in all things tea.

Did you know, for example, that all tea - black, green, white - is from the same plant? I did know that as a matter of fact, but what I did not know is that there is only a 40 minute processing step that separates green and black tea. (I am not talking about herbal tea, which is not tea at all, but a tisane).

Tea grows between 1000-2300 metres, on steep slopes. Here silver oaks are planted at intervals to provide shade. And eucalyptus trees are grown in large forests among the slopes to provide fuel for the tea processing. Now, other fuel sources are being used, so the eucalyptus are sometimes being cut down for the wood, and then more tea is planted wherever the slope is optimal.

silver oak in amongst the tea

First of all, tea is plucked (not picked - plucked - they are very clear on that!) from the top of the tea plant: the bud, two leaves on top, and one leaf below. No other leaves are touched, but pruned off at some point in the year, so tea plants all look like green tiles, virtually flat on top where they have been plucked.

tea leaves and tip ready to be plucked

the plucked tea

These pluckings are brought to the factory for processing. The first step is washing and tossing the leaves, allowing them to wilt, which takes 12-15 hours.

Wilted tea

Then the leaves are placed in one of two units: a roller that rolls the leaves (for long leaf tea) or the CTC unit. CTC stands for crushing, tearing and curling. This involves the leaves going through 4 rollers and 4 conveyor belts, each time coming out a little finer in size.

part of a CTC unit

the 4th and last part of the CTC unit

if you like long leaf tea, this is where it goes to be rolled,
rather than crushed, torn and curled

This is when the tea is separated into green tea or black tea. Black tea requires oxidization and so goes into a unit where it is heated until black - this only takes about 40 minutes.

for fermenting, with the finished black tea ending up in a sack (left)

Regardless of whether the tea is fermented (oxidized) for black tea or left for green tea, the leaves now go through a machine that electro-statically separates the stems from the other bits.

tea goes in the top and then shudders and shakes through the mesh

different buckets for the different sizes of tea particles

These stems then become compost, and the rest of the tea goes to yet another machine that acts as a giant sifter so that the different particles of tea are divided by size. The large pieces are lighter in appearance but stronger in flavour, the small pieces (almost like tea dust) are darker in appearance but lighter in flavour, and the middle-sized pieces are what goes in tea bags.

full array of tea:
top left - CTC tea at top, then separated into 3 different sizes
top middle- rolled tea at top, then the compostable bits removed
top right - the tea plucking, green CTC tea, compostable bits

The top quality is called orthodox orange pekoe, then long leaf tippy, and so on down the proverbial food chain, according to size and thus flavour. This is the same for black and green tea.

tea gradings, from left:
Golden Flowery Broken Orange Pekoe (high quality leaves but uneven sized leaves and a few tips)
Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe (higher proportion of tips)
Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe (highest proportion of tips) (my personal favourite)
Orange Pekoe(main grade with long wiry leaves with no tips)

Remember when I mentioned white tea at the beginning?  Well, the only thing that makes white tea different from green tea is that only the plant's tip is used, without any of the leaves. And of course it is is not fermented, like black tea. This is why white tea is more expensive, because only the tips are used, but it's really the same plant and processing otherwise.

The enormous and admirable Indian company Tata took over the Munnar tea fields, in partnership in 1964 and then entirely in 1983 (Tata owns Tetley tea), but in 2005 a local cooperative was formed by the tea employees and Tata voluntarily transferred all its rights to the plantations to focus on its branded tea business, maintaining a minority of shares. This cooperative (the Kannan Devan Hill Plantations Company Private Ltd.) assures all employees are shareholders and decisions are made right from the local level.