From the very beginning the demand for Ceylon tea grew exponentially and across the globe. Even with tea grown on over 4% of the island, meeting the demand was a challenge. Finally, as an answer to this challenge, The Ceylon Chamber of Commerce and the Ceylon Tea Traders Association tea auction houses were formed to auction Ceylon tea to the tea brokers round the world.

Excellence however is never a fluke, but the result of personal pride and detail. Ceylon tea is no exception. Women, clad in brightly colored saris with a jute bag flung across their backs, dot the tea estates early in the morning to handpick the two tender-most leaves and a bud from every bush with their nimble fingers. Even today, in a time where everything is mechanized and automated, Ceylon tea is still handpicked with the most experienced hands. There is yet to be a machine that excels or at least equates to human touch and experience, as every cup of pure Ceylon tea proves.

Timing is everything in tea. A delay between the plucking and the processing drastically affects the finished product’s quality. The plucked leaves are rushed to the factory that reflects in the middle of the estates like silver matchboxes. The leaves are withered, making it pliable, then rolled, twisted and broken, bringing about a catalytic reaction in the leaf particles. The leaf particles are then pressed and exposed to warm air to ferment. Proper fermentation is important to make the tea liquor palatable. Depending on the prevailing weather, the time required to complete fermentation differs, which is where experience kicks in. The green leaf is now a bright coppery colored particle and it is time for the leaf particle to stop further chemical reaction, and the firing chamber achieves this termination. Once again experience comes into play as the chamber’s temperature effects the tea’s keeping qualities. The tea comes from the chamber hard and black and ready for grading. The particles are now sieved through a series of fine meshes and the ‘residue’ left in each sieve is graded accordingly.

Who invented this process or how or why it came about remains mostly a mystery. It is more interesting the close similarities that run in making both tea and wine – the two worldly beverages. Grapes might be crushed by foot, but the principle that goes into growing and processing tea and wine is very similar. Indeed, Ceylon tea and French wines roll with the same velvety richness on the palette. The Ceylon tea grown on the low lands of Ruhuna has the voluptuousness of a Cabernet Sauvignon. The tea grown in mid-country of Kandy and Matale carries the lightness of a Shiraz and the high-grown tea from Uva and Dimbula the suppleness of a Pinot Noir. The Nuwara Eliya tea however caps it all with the lightness of Champagne.

In a time where time is money and money is everything, many tea cultivating countries have deviated from this orthodox method of processing tealeaves. In a process known as CTC (Cut-Tear-Curl), the newly plucked tealeaves are rushed through machines, instantly rolling, twisting and breaking it. The speed with which the leaves are treated creates a heat, which in turn quickens fermentation. The resulting tea has none of the civility of tea produced from the orthodox method, but a raw, gut-ire flavor.

Sri Lanka is one of the very few tea cultivating countries to still remain largely with the orthodox procedure, despite the expensive procedure yielding low quantities with longer time processing periods required. As a direct result, pure Ceylon tea is one of the most expensive teas that are available in the market today and most mass producers struggle with it. A product that boasts of containing Ceylon tea and yet cheaper in price is definitely not pure Ceylon tea, but a mixture of cheaper tea produced elsewhere and little or often no Ceylon tea.

Read the next in series, My Cup of Tea