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.