by Jeff Koehler
“Darjeeling tea is special for the most important thing, the human element,” said Sujoy Sengupta. Easygoing, wearing a short-sleeved shirt in his Kolkata office during the summer heat (while many of his colleagues wore ties), he spent a dozen years on some of Darjeeling’s finest gardens before moving to the headquarters of the Chamong group.
“Plucking can only be done by hand,” he said, as machines are unable to selectively chose the right shoots that Darjeeling tea requires. “Judging fermentation can only be done by nose.” The process is tactile and intuitive. It’s about feeling the leaves as they change in texture, about smelling them. And about making often spontaneous judgment calls. “You cannot just put the leaves in huge machines and expect to make excellent Darjeeling tea,” he insisted. “The human touch is in every step.”
That begins early in cultivation. Saplings are planted out in the field, usually in April or May. A tea bush will grow into an ungainly tree and needs to be shaped into a low, flat table if it is to be plucked. After reaching about three or four feet tall, it will start getting regular pruning. This tedious and laborious work is fundamental. Such cutting encourages lateral branching, and the young trees are trained to spread and create a solid frame and high density of plucking points. When properly shaped, new shoots will appear above the level surface of the table, which pluckers can easily reach, rather than at the center of the bush. Pruning also stimulates regular flushing of the bush.
Pluckers, who are always women, do not take all of a tea bush’s leaves. The coarse leaves do not make quality teas. The women look for the tender, newer shoots that are smaller, a lighter, brighter green, and have a softer feel. They select only the first two leaves and a terminal bud at a time, a pluck called dwi paat suiro in Nepali. It is done by taking the stem between thumb and forefinger and twisting for a clean snap of the top shoot with the hand and wrist, rather than by breaking with the fingernail or clipping with sheers or any kind of blade. This is the classic Darjeeling “fine-pluck.” It requires ten thousand of these to produce a single pound of finished Darjeeling tea.
Plucking this apical part of a tea shoot stimulates growth of dormant leaves and buds. In seven days or so, new shoots appear above the plucking table as the fresh leaves and buds unfold, and the bush is picked again. This is called a plucking round. Seven days is the Darjeeling standard. Beyond that and the leaves’ quality for made tea decreases.
Older tea sections on an estate have a single hedge layout with around eight thousand plants per hectare, but new plantings normally use a double-hedge formation containing up to eighteen thousand bushes per hectare, with upper reaches and steeper slopes closer to twelve thousand. In this style, saplings are placed two feet apart in parallel rows of tea bushes along the contours, with a four-foot gap for pluckers to move, and then two more parallel rows of bushes spaced two feet apart. Planted intermittently among the tea are shade trees. These lower the temperature and raise the humidity around them, create windbreaks, and also help replace the nitrogen in the soil. These are tall, high-branching species that won’t interfere with plucking and have small leaves that won’t cover the hedges when they fall.
Making their way between rows of tight, interlocked bushes, the women pluck with both hands and, when they cannot hold any more, toss the leaves into the conical basket on their backs. The woven bamboo basket measures about eighteen inches deep, eighteen inches across the top, and tapers down to a flat bottom just eight inches wide. Depending on personal preference, they use either a loosely woven one called tokri in Nepali or one with a tighter weave called doko. The baskets are suspended not by shoulder straps like a backpack but by a thick strap of bright cloth that stretches across the top of the forehead. During the day, pluckers dump their baskets twice: once before lunch and once at the end of the day. Apart from weighing progressively more, the leaves start to chemically change once plucked and need to be processed as soon as possible.
The precariously steep terrain that adds to the unfeasibility of mechanized harvesting also makes the meticulous plucking required even more difficult. The average worker produces just 396 pounds of finished tea a year, less than a quarter of the 1,644 pounds than her Assam counterpart manages.1 (It takes five pounds of freshly plucked leaves for one pound of finished Darjeeling tea.)
Small villages are spread throughout the slopes of a garden, and women, working in groups of a dozen to twenty, generally pluck sections nearest their homes. Work starts at seven thirty A.M. There is an hour break for lunch. They walk back to their houses to prepare a quick meal or sit in a shady spot along the road and eat from a nested tiffin lunch box. Afternoon plucking lasts until four P.M. or so.
While plucking is a woman’s job, supervising them is generally considered a man’s. In 1990, the Makaibari plucker Maya Davi Chettrini became the first woman supervisor in Darjeeling. With strong, wiry arms, a buried but easily unearthed smile, and a bright vermilion bindi on her forehead, Chettrini exudes a clear sense of leadership and offers unshakable support to the women under her. She tells them which section to work, precisely which type of pluck is required—two-leaves-and-a-bud, one-leaf-and-a-bud, silver leaves (meaning bud only)—and the minimum daily picking levels. (Less, and they are docked; more and they receive a bonus.) There is no set district or even garden standard. The small leaves of the first flush mean a lower picking minimum than during the larger, more profusely flushing moments of the monsoon. A garden’s—or section’s—elevation can determine the amount, as do the style of pluck and leaf type, with the traditional China jat having smaller leaves than the Assam variety, which can also be found on most estates. The trend of women supervisors is slowly taking hold across the district.
The supervisor also makes certain that leaves are weighed and recorded correctly. Strategically located around the farm, weighment sheds are simple, open structures with corrugated-tin roofs, just enough to shelter from the sun, or the rain, and a place for the large, portable hanging scale with a hook to suspend the plucking basket.*
The weighed leaves get piled into the back of a pickup truck or a small tractor trailer, which heads up the narrow, steep, and precarious dirt estate roads to the tin-roofed factory to be processed on-site. As with wine and olive oil—but unlike with most other agricultural products—all production, from cultivation to processing, takes place on the estate.
Getting green leaves rapidly to the factory is key to the final quality of the tea. Some estates set up makeshift weighment stations closer to each day’s picking areas to facilitate this. Glenburn has sunk a series of sturdy bamboo poles into the ground to create pairs of overlapping A-framed bases. When picking nearby, a bamboo pole is suspended over the top to hang a heavy scale, looking something like a pioneer swing set. “They increase productivity time,” Sharma said on a brief stop at one of these stations during his daily rounds of the garden in autumn. A woman held a tall ledger to record in her fine, neat hand the amount of each plucker. “And the leaf comes to factory faster.”
Sharma picked up a handful of leaves from the pile dumped from the women’s baskets after being weighed. “Tea making is about control,” he said. “The moment you pluck a leaf the process starts. You set in motion a chain reaction.” When the leaves are mounded up, they generate a lot of heat. A hand thrust into the center of the pile can feel the warmth created under the pressure. This can damage the leaves. “All the damage that needs to be done, you want to do to it,” he added with a grin. The leaves in his hand were bright and tender as baby salad greens.
Once reaching the factory, the leaves will become finished tea within twenty-four hours.
The unique taste of Darjeeling tea comes, finally, in the manner of processing, where each step influences the final flavor of the liquor. Here, the art—and magic—of making tea comes, when the leaves begin to develop their unique flavors and aromas, almost mystically transforming into something far richer.
While the process has been simplified from Lu Yü’s instructions thirteen
centuries ago—machines instead of hands now do the rolling; fermented tea is essentially baked rather than pan-cooked—it continues true to ancient principles. In Darjeeling, tea makers remain stridently, adamantly orthodox in their processing, which, in fact, is called, simply, “orthodox.” It contains just a handful of steps to turn green leaves into finished Darjeeling black tea: withering, rolling, fermenting, and drying before the tea gets sorted, graded, and packed.
The long building where the tea is processed is called a factory. But that name is misleading. Generally two or three stories high with pitched, corrugated-tin roofs and worn-smooth wood floors, they tend to be airy, somewhat lofty spaces, clean, and continuously swept of falling tea leaves with a long whisk broom called phool jhadoo (made with a spray of dried native grass flowers called kuccho). Factories are tidy rather than sterile, manual rather than automated. Even in celebrated gardens such as Makaibari, Castleton, Jungpana, and Lingia, the industrial equipment is a century old and still driven, or fired, by coal.
“It is nothing but a big kitchen,” Makaibari’s Rajah Banerjee said, and the key “was good housekeeping.”
“You can’t enhance quality of leaf in the factory, but you can destroy it,” Rishi Saria said over a late breakfast in the Rohini bungalow. “It is very easy to destroy in factory.”
The freshly picked leaves are taken to a factory’s low-ceilinged withering loft and evenly and loosely spread, some eight inches or so deep, in long, narrow wooden troughs. Stretching seventy to eighty feet in length and just an arm’s span wide, they have fine-wire-mesh bottoms through which air blows. Over fourteen to sixteen hours, about two-thirds of the moisture gets removed from the leaf. In the monsoon season, with wet leaves and humidity at nearly 100 percent, the air is first cool to wick away the surface moisture, then gets heated by a coal fire to help the withering.
During withering, the fresh leaves begin to wilt and turn, far from uniformly, into deeper olive-green shades edged and splotched with browns, like unraked leaves after a series of prefall windstorms. The leaves soften and become pliable and limp so that they can be rolled without breaking. By morning, the soft blanket of leaves in the troughs has wilted to barely knuckle deep.
Gathered into the hands, they exude a faint autumn fruitiness, smelling lightly of apples, say, or pears. “But smell is not important in withering,” said B. B. Singh at Rohini. “It’s feel.”
Experienced workers can tell by touch when the correct wither has been reached. Indrey Sarki has been in charge of the withering for forty-three years at Makaibari and knows just by squeezing a handful of leaves when they have lost 50 or 60 or the optimal 65 percent of their moisture. One morning in the withering loft at the end of the second flush, when the monsoon rains had begun their continual drenching, Sarki took some leaves in a hand, bunched up his fist—the ball ought to initially hold together—and then opened it. “It should slowly open,” he explained in Nepali as the cluster of leaves unfurled on his palm. His voice was low, barely audible over the rollicking hum of the rolling machines below. “If it is brittle, it is not a good sign. You won’t get a good roll.” The leaves will break instead. This is a particular challenge during the monsoon season when the air is warmed.
Sarki tossed the leaves back on the trough and walked on. They had sprung open too quickly and weren’t ready yet.
• • •
Once fully withered, the leaves get gathered up and dropped down a square hatch in the upper floor or through a cloth chute to the rolling machines below. Nearly all of the factories use beefy models manufactured in Calcutta by Britannia, often eighty- or ninety-year-old machines that have layer upon layer of paint like a barge’s hull. Workers in the first decades of the tea industry in Darjeeling rolled leaves back and forth against the hard surface of long wooden tables using their palms and forearms in a repetitive up-and-then-across motion. The Britannia machines mimic this somewhat. They have a central rotary piece that holds the leaves while the saucerlike table beneath it gyrates to twist and curl the leaves without breaking them. This is the most mechanized part of tea making.
A worker watches constantly to make sure that the leaves don’t get too warm from the friction and to see when the roll is tight enough—not wound into a ball (like gunpowder green tea), but something much more open than that. Imagine taking a couple of leaves and rubbing them between the palms to get long, wiry, and twisty leaves.
Rolling takes from fifteen to ninety minutes depending on the flush, weather, and wither of the leaves, plus desired strength in the final tea. A longer roll or a harder one—more pressure on the leaves—will give more color and body to the liquor, more astringency, but less finesse and aroma.
“If the leaf is rough,” the factory manager at Castleton said, “then more wither and harder rolling.” This complements an old tea maker’s adage: “The higher the wither, the harder the roll.” But the first flush can’t handle a hard roll. “It has a lot of juice,” Castleton’s deputy manager, Parminder Singh Bhoi, added. “A harder roll will break the leaf. If the leaf is fine, then already the flavor is there.”
In rolling, the leaves become like curing tobacco in feel and turn from deep grayish green to coppery brown. They also become warm, evidence that changes are happening within the leaf.
That transformation is the beginning of fermentation. Or, more correctly, oxidization. Rolling initiates this process by rupturing the cells and releasing the natural juices of the leaves. When exposed to the air, they begin to oxidize.
Fermentation acts as a catalyst for the flavors and colors associated with Darjeeling tea. The tea develops the pungency, strength, and aroma that will be in the final cup.
This takes place on fermentation tables. At Goomtee and Bannockburn, these are portable sheets of steel no more than six feet long, carried like triage gurneys, and stacked on top of one another as needed in front of the rolling machines. Castleton has eight white, polished tables, roughly twenty-five feet long by about six feet wide in a well-lit side of the factory below windows that look out over a steep valley to the east of Kurseong and onto Mount Kanchenjunga. Nearby, Makaibari uses a set of concrete bunks with four tiers in a dim, partitioned corner of the factory. The tea goes on long, metal trays with lips like oversize baking sheets, which are carried by two men. The much larger Tukvar has well over a dozen similar bunk-bed-like tables, sturdy and given numerous whitewashings over the years, that hold the wide metal trays of fermenting tea. Marybong’s setup is altogether different: Four waist-high stainless-steel tables some twenty paces long run across one end of the factory and are cared for by men in blue jumpsuits and baseball caps who, excluding their flip-flops and lack of grease stains, look like mechanics at a chain of oil-lube shops.
While the beds may vary, their purpose remains identical. On them, workers spread the leaves in a thin layer just a few inches deep so they can get plenty of the air required to oxidize. Except during the first flush, when fermentation is short, this step takes a couple of hours. As elsewhere in tea making, the constants are few, and a series of variables change from day to day—temperature, humidity, and leaf quality, as well as the desired strength of the final tea. Gauging exactly how long to ferment falls outside the realm of the intellect or even a reliable calculated equation, residing in instinct, experience, and the nose. As the leaves take on their distinctive coppery-brown color, managers or assistants repeatedly scoop handfuls of the leaves to check their progress by smelling them. The aromas have ripened, become sweeter, and exude hints of dried fruits and nuts: mellower as opposed to sharper; richer. “Smell is what decides fermentation,” said Rohini’s Singh, pressing a handful of fermenting autumn flush to his nose. This is the only way.
The flavor line climbs steeply like a wave, increasing to what Sarki calls “the first nose,” decreases for two or three minutes, then goes up again to the “second nose,” where it peaks before dropping off sharply. The goal is to find that topmost crest, the point when a particular batch of tea is
at its best—and then fire the leaves immediately to stop the fermentation before their qualities begin to fade. “If it goes past the second nose, you can’t get back flavor,” Sarki said. “It’s lost.” While the leaves are fermenting, he sniffs them every ten or fifteen minutes, even more frequently toward the end.
Determining that moment is the most critical part of tea making. Every leaf on the bed does not ferment exactly the same, and a majority approach is used when gauging the overall progression of the batch. Underfermented, the finished tea will be brownish and brittle, the liquor less bright, thin, with less body; overfermented, it turns blackish, the tea loses its sheen, turns flat, and Darjeeling’s refined lightness becomes heavier and stewy. At Makaibari, as with withering, Sarki makes the call. He’s slight, with tiny, deep-set eyes, a reluctant smile, and a trademark soft, Nepalese Dhaka topi cloth cap in a woven black, red, and silver pattern. Born on Makaibari—his father was a laborer on the estate—he is the most senior man in the factory. But this isn’t why he is responsible for this key decision. Sarki possesses an extraordinary olfactory gift, a once-in-a-generation talent, according to Rajah Banerjee. “He’s a bloodhound.”
The correct fermentation offers a balance of aroma, brightness, briskness, and strength. Compromises must be gauged and weighed, and a proper equilibrium found among those attributes for the final, desired cup. This depends on each garden and on each tea maker.
