Visiting the Nilgiris Mountains in Southern India

I just returned to Oregon after spending seven months in India. Since I’ve been back, things have quickly started heating up as we transition from “planning” to “doing." But before the events of the summer get lost, I wanted to share what happened in the last few months of India. This is the first of two posts related to that time.

We began by visiting factories that were processing green leaves into the finished tea we drink. There are two general ways tea is processed; the traditional method, which is referred to as “orthodox”, and the more industrial “crush-tear-curl”, or CTC style. We met factory owners of both types and toured their factories.

As we learned, this factory-orientation made sense given the history of Indian tea. The British introduced tea in India during the 19th century to replace China as their supplier. From the beginning, therefore, Indian tea has been developed as a cash crop and oriented towards industrial-scale production. For example, more than 90% of tea produced in India is CTC and intended to be prepared with milk, spices, and more than one teaspoon of sugar.
As a result, the top-quality orthodox teas we are after are quite rare and will require a good amount of searching to find. This also means that if we focus on weaving artistry into the cultivation program we are planning in the northern state of Uttarakhand, we’ll be providing something truly unique. More details to come on that program in the next post.


For example, in the ideal, most teas are processed using only the bud and top two leaves and the bushes are kept to a uniform level called the plucking table. Without a large enough workforce to maintain the huge estates, the pluckers are unable to return to the bushes frequently. When they do, they have to pluck more than the top two leaves to restore the plucking table, which leads to a lower quality tea. This suggested that a small-scale approach would be more sustainable in the long-run, although it would also mean a radical departure from the way tea is grown and processed now.

Well, there was much more that happened on the trip, including visiting an auction house, exploring the local markets, and an argument between our driver and a bus that almost led to a fistfight. But since we’ll definitely be selling teas from this region, there will luckily be more trips and more posts to come.
In our next post, I’ll be writing about our tea cultivation program that we’re planning with an NGO in the northern Central Himalayas. Until then!
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