The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea - Michael Harney [43]
The tea makers begin by withering the leaves very briefly, then rolling them for just fifteen minutes, using hardly any pressure on the leaves. Instead of rolling them on a table between pressurized disks, they pour the leaves into a vertical cylinder with a sieve at its base. As the cylinder slowly spins, the leaves rub up against and lightly macerate one another. Kept whole and undamaged, the tips don’t oxidize while the rest of the leaves do. Thus the tips stay a shiny silver.
As the leaves jostle about, the finest, smallest, and most delicate ones fall through the sieve. The rest of the leaves—about 99.5 percent of them—are transferred to a rolling machine to become ordinary bulk low-grown tea. The smallest and most delicate leaves are left to oxidize for about two hours, much more than most Ceylon teas. They are also blasted with moist air of the sort that jets from a humidifier. This moist air may provoke the leaves to form their characteristic cocoa and chocolate flavors. I only speculate, as the same humidifying treatment is afforded Keemun Chinese black teas, which have similar cocoa notes (see “Keemun Mao Feng,” page 112, and “Keemun Hao Ya A,” page 114). Like Keemuns, the New Vithanakande teas are fired at a hotter temperature than other Ceylon teas, which likely creates a Maillard reaction to reinforce the cocoa flavors.
After firing, the tea makers spread out the leaves on a fine-mesh strainer and sort through them by hand. Every other British Legacy Tea is processed entirely by machine, but the makers of New Vithanakande sift the leaves, gently working the smallest particles through the strainer. The silver tips are larger and remain with the tea; the smaller golden tips fall through to the floor. The result is a delicious, surprisingly engaging low-grown tea, as beautiful to look at as to drink.
KENILWORTH BOP1 Kenilworth Broken Orange Pekoe No. 1
This medium-bodied middle-grown tea has a wonderfully easygoing nature. The Kenilworth tea estate is one of the oldest in Sri Lanka, established by a Scot in the nineteenth century. Halfway up Sri Lanka’s Central Highlands, at an elevation of roughly two thousand feet, the temperatures are not as hot as low-grown tea areas, but the Kenilworth estate is still hotter and more humid than the high-grown areas in the Highlands’ peaks. Typical medium-grown teas like Kenilworth are soothingly mellow, yet still assertively brisk.
Kenilworth teas peak in the spring, when the monsoons douse the other half of the island with rain. The monsoons draw moisture out of the air around the garden, concentrating the flavors in the tea leaves. After harvesting, tea makers at Kenilworth give their leaves a medium wither, in contrast with the light withering of Assams and the hard withering of Darjeelings. To macerate the leaves, they use Orthodox rolling machines, but at a faster pace and for a longer period than any other Ceylon teas—two hours. In another unusual step, the rolled leaves are distributed onto trays that circulate for another two hours on a moving belt that snakes around the room. After oxidizing 100 percent, the leaves are dried in ovens at a hotter temperature than that for high-grown teas. The thorough rolling, oxidation, and intense firing help reinforce the mellow, baked flavors that make this one of the most famous teas in Sri Lanka.
UVA HIGHLANDS PEKOE
Sri Lanka produces an incredible array of teas within a surprisingly confined area in the highest parts of country’s Central Highlands. A two-hour drive will take you from Dimbulla, an estate famous for malty, thick, dark-colored brews, to Nuwara Eliya, a gorgeous spot whose cluster of tea gardens is renowned for light-colored liquors and lemony, floral aromas. The teas from both gardens are all worth trying. I had difficulty choosing which high-altitude tea to include