Three days in Kurseong
I went to Kurseong to negotiate and mostly ended up apologising to tea, for every cup of it I'd made badly.
Day one was the garden at first light, 1,400-odd metres up, cold enough to see your breath in June. The pluckers work a stretch of hillside in pairs, two leaves and a bud, faster than seems possible and gentler than seems necessary. I asked the field manager how machines compare. He looked at me the way you'd look at someone who asked whether a photocopier could do a painting.
Day two was the factory, which is a grand word for a building where four processes happen very slowly. Withering troughs run the length of a cricket pitch. The rolling machines date from the seventies and the mechanic speaks about them like old horses. Rolling is where whole-leaf lives or dies, because too much pressure turns it into expensive dust. The factory manager pulled a handful off the belt, smelled it, adjusted nothing, and nodded. That nod is the quality system.
Day three was the tasting room, and the uncomfortable part. Lot after lot sat on a long table, and the best two were already spoken for, first by an auction house and then by a blender in another country, where they'd vanish into a tin labelled with a different mountain. The lot we eventually shook hands on was the third best I tasted that week, and better than anything I'd ever bought in a shop at home.
That's the whole business plan, honestly. Get to the table earlier. Keep the lot whole. Put the week it was plucked on the tin, because the week matters and nobody was writing it down for us.
Batch one from that handshake is on the batch log now. The frost that spring made it what it is.