From plant to cup – Discovering Tea

The experience of plucking tea

29 November 2024

To understand tea and how it’s made, there’s nothing like experiencing it first hand, starting with plucking, when the young leaves are selected for processing. It’s only by doing it yourself that you can truly appreciate the precision, care and difficulty involved in every stage of making a tea, especially one of premium quality.
Here in Kalapani (Nepal), Céline, who manages the entire supply chain for Palais des Thés, is being shown how to pluck tea, and is concentrating on picking the bud and the top two leaves from each shoot that has reached the desired stage of growth.

Getting to know your teas

15 November 2024

You can tell a lot about a tea by looking at the dry leaves: its bud content, the size and colour of the leaves, the degree of oxidation. This is one of the main reasons for buying tea loose, to appreciate its quality. You don’t need to be an expert, but it’s good to be able to make informed choices about your tea, and the appearance of the leaf plays an important part in what you experience when you drink it.

There’s another reason to buy loose tea: the pleasure of tea doesn’t start with the first sip, it starts when you’re at home boiling the kettle and can’t decide which tea to brew. As the water heats up, you lift the lids off your caddies, jars or tins and recreate the experience of the tea shop: smelling the leaves, looking at them and choosing the tea that feels right for the moment. This process prepares us for the ritual of tasting.

Here, all you have to do is look at these beautiful leaves (the remarkable work of many small Nepalese growers deserves a mention) and you’ll want to get to know them better.

The joy of tea

18 October 2024

You can travel the world sourcing, tasting and analysing tea. But it’s not often you get to actually make it – to pick the leaves, roll them in your hands, spread them out to wither, and watch them oxidise until it’s time to dry them. It’s a rare opportunity for a tea connoisseur.

Here in Georgia, Nathalie, our Human Relations Manager, and Charlotte, who runs our Rue Raymond-Losserand store in Paris, are discovering the joys of making tea for themselves.

They tasted it the next day. When this photo was taken, they hadn’t yet realised quite how special the whole experience would be, how proud they would feel. It was the first time they had crafted their own tea. An unforgettable experience.

Smoked tea

21 June 2024

Smoked tea aficionados – who have been known to panic when their supply runs out – know that nothing else can match the powerful aromas of this blend from China, even if the Chinese themselves wouldn’t dream of drinking it. When you smell it, you could swear you were in the fireplace itself, it’s so intense. The most famous of these smoked teas is Lapsang Souchong. For some obscure reason, a molecule called anthraquinone has got up the European Union’s nose. So, from time to time, we have to approach new producers from various countries to ask them to test smoking processes using different types of wood, in this case pine needles.

A quality harvest

10 May 2024

Tea doesn’t harvest itself. It’s important to me to highlight the work of the people who pick the buds and the next two leaves from each shoot that make up a quality plucking. This delicate work, still done by hand in many countries, is particularly important because it is impossible to produce a good tea if the leaves are not picked carefully enough in the first place.

The cuttings nursery

15 March 2024

To make good tea, you need to know your tea bushes well. It’s a lot easier if you’ve tended them yourself from a young age. Many plantations – like this one in Satemwa, Malawi – take their own cuttings and then grow them in a nursery for eighteen months. Shaded to protect them from too much sun and too little humidity, the cuttings develop their root systems. Later, the young tea plants are planted out in the ground and begin their adult lives. Then it’s time to harvest the shoots, which are few and far between in the early seasons, but become more abundant as the bushes develop and branch out.

Shade and green manure

26 January 2024

Tea bushes need light, of course, but they don’t like to be in direct sunlight all day long. They prefer some shade from time to time, especially at lower altitudes where temperatures can climb quickly. So growers plant a light canopy to keep their tea bushes happy and give them some respite. This cover is usually made up of plants from the legume family, whose leaves enrich the soil with nitrogen as they decompose. It’s a kind of green manure, and the tea bushes really appreciate it.

Small producers and large estates

17 November 2023

In Darjeeling, a region I’m particularly fond of and have visited many times, there are large estates built by the British in the mid to late 19th century, as well as a number of small, local producers who own a few acres or collect the leaves harvested by neighbouring farmers. Some work on abandoned plantations. In these cases, the whole family harvests and then processes the leaves using artisanal methods, sometimes with great success. These initiatives include the Yanki Tea Farm and the Niroula Tea Farm.

The second nose

3 November 2023

One of the trickiest stages in making black tea is achieving the right level of oxidation. The leaves are left to wither for a good ten hours or so, then tossed to bruise them and break down their structure. Then it’s time for the oxidation process, which requires humid conditions. During this stage, the leaves change colour from green to brown. Their aromas also change radically, developing notes of wood, stewed fruit and spices, among many others. When should oxidation be stopped? In Darjeeling, producers use the “second nose” principle. At the beginning of the oxidation process, the tea leaves give off an intense aroma that gradually fades after a few minutes, only to return in full force a while later. This return of aroma is known as the second nose. It signals that it’s time to stop oxidation as the perfect level has been achieved. All that remains is for the leaves to be dried, sorted and packaged.

Strike day

27 October 2023

Today, on the eve of the biggest religious festival in the Indian state of West Bengal, workers at this plantation in the Dooars are on strike. They are demanding an increase in their annual bonus, which they use to buy gifts for their family and friends. The bonus is a significant part of their annual salary. Meanwhile, the tea bushes proudly support the bags and umbrellas. A few hours later, having achieved what they wanted, everyone returns to their belongings and the picking resumes.