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By Root 195 0

influence in the region waned. The makers of the best Darjeelings, Assams, and Ceylons began innovating to appeal to a broader reach of tea drinkers. In the last thirty to forty years, many have taken advantage of modernizations in production and tea transport to improve their teas. The best Orthodox Darjeelings now have bright fruity qualities to rival oolongs. Honeyed, malty Assams have won a loyal following for their assertive, robust flavors. Ceylons are winning notice for creativity and invention, seemingly producing a new and different style for each garden on the small island. It is these more recent—and more delicious—teas that we will taste now.

DARJEELING BLACK TEAS

1. Singbulli SFTGFOP1 Supreme Dj 18

2. Margaret’s Hope FTGFOP Muscatel Dj 275

3. Himalayan Tips SFTGFOP1 Second Flush

4. Okayti Dj 480 Autumnal FTGFOP

The northeastern region of Darjeeling on the border of Nepal and Bhutan is famous for three seasons of tea: the spring’s First Flush, the early summer’s Second Flush, and the late summer and fall’s Autumnal teas. Though they grow more subdued the farther they get from spring, all three seasonal teas have a charming rounded quality, a depth and a gentleness to rival Chinese black teas. The First Flushes in particular have lively floral and fruit aromas to rival oolongs. We will try all of them.

I place Darjeelings first in this unit on British Legacy Teas not only because they were the first teas made by the Raj, but also because they most closely resemble Chinese black teas and are the most natural progression to follow them. Crafted to give a similar rounded quality, Darjeelings also have more tropical fruit flavors like pineapple and guava, and a little more bite than Chinese Black teas from their more hastened oxidation.

Darjeeling has produced teas only since the 1830s. In their quest to grow tea in India, the British discovered that the native Chinese tea bush, Camellia sinensis var. sinensis, flourished there. In what remains one of the highest-altitude tea-growing regions in the world, in the cool air and hardscrabble soil of the Himalayan foothills, the tea leaves grow slowly, taking on lovely variegated flavors. Though British plantations marketed their product as the Champagne of teas, what they churned out was heavy, dark, and brisk, almost begging for the softening effects of milk and sugar. I still have older customers who pine for this traditional Darjeeling flavor.

In 1947, independence brought an end to the Raj, and British influence in the region waned. Great Britain began importing the bulk of its teas from Africa. In the late 1960s, in a search for new teas to capture a fresh audience, Bernd Wulf, founder of HTH, the tea wholesaling firm my family buys from, worked with an Indian tea dealer named Ranabir Sen. The two experimented with lightening the teas to let the leaves’ flavorful qualities come through.

First they made sure that the harvesters gathered only the most flavorful parts of the plant. Following the Chinese example, the harvesters snipped only young leafsets of two leaves and a bud. Then they lengthened the withering time to build up the teas’ extraordinary aromas and give them a lighter, almost greenish cast. You’ll recall that oolong tea makers wither tea leaves right after harvesting them to soften them up for rolling. In Darjeeling, to fight off the cold and damp weather, tea makers wither their leaves in heated troughs. Wulf and Sen found that if they left the leaves in the troughs long after the leaves had gone limp, in what’s now called a “hard wither,” the teas took on remarkably strong aromas similar to those of oolongs. The tea’s flavors also became more complex. Hard withering kept many of the leaves green by deactivating a percentage of the enzyme that would otherwise turn the green leaves brown. The hard withering affects different cultivars to varying degrees; since most gardens use a variety of clones, many good Darjeelings have a beautiful mixture of black and green leaves.

Wulf and Sen also carefully adjusted