tastes like dragon

the next couple of weeks were spent learning the ins-and-outs of cultivating and maintaining a 150-year-old (this year!) mountainside tea estate. we saw bamboo bigger than we'd ever seen before (it's freakin' HUGE), learned about the permaculture principles applied on the tea estate, made momos (tibetan dumplings) learned about the proper application of compost and mulch, made momos, learned the secrets of the biodynamic process, made more momos, and learned about proper pruning and "rejuvenation" techniques. hopefully one day we'll have enough bandwidth and be on a computer with a new enough version of internet explorer to make a couple posts on these experiences possible, but for now, you get the reader's digest version. (for the record, the fact that we are in rural southern asia and there is any internet access at all is amazing, so don't think we're complaining).

which brings us to our final week at makaibari. with the rajah in calcutta for family reasons, we were left to make our own schedule, and we decided to focus on the processing and tasting sides of things. so we got to the factory at 5 am to watch the final stages of the withering process of tea that was plucked the afternoon before. we followed the leaves from the withering troughs, where they are dumped after being brought in from the field, to the rolling machines, to the drying machine, and finally to the sorting room, where the processed tea is separated into countless different classes and grades of finished tea.


leaves wither from 12-18 hours, depending on moisture levels. a 15-minute difference in withering can mean a huge difference in taste.

that afternoon, we set up a tasting session with mr. sanjoy, the asst. manager of the factory. we met in the tasting room, where the woman who makes tea for visitors (i forget the nepali word for this position...) steeped 2 grams of 6 different kinds of tea for exactly five minutes each. they had prepared for us a sampling of their 6 main types of tea - first flush, second flush (muscatel), oolong, silver green, bai mu dan (white tea), and silver tips imperial.



we were invited to first look at the color (liquor) of the tea, then to look at the dried leaves, then to look at and smell the steeped leaves, and finally to taste the tea, using a specific slurping method to send the tea all around your mouth and open up the flavors (hoity-toity as it may sound, it really does help). we figure if we're ever going to make tea, we need to train our palates so we know if it's any good.


see how different the colors of these cups of tea are - all just through slight variations of processing.

mr. sanjoy was very helpful and informative, and after he left, we lingered for a while longer, inspecting the leaves and quizzing each other with blind taste tests. we left feeling exhilarated, alive, and ready to drink more tea.


white tea leaves


makaibari's silver tips imperial tea is by many accounts the most expensive tea in the world. seth thinks it tastes like licking a dragon, which he swears is a good thing.


maggie inspecting the bounty


seth blindly tasting