From the garden to Park Street: how a lot is packed

Each pack of tea we sell starts as one lot from a garden: a fixed quantity of tea made on a few days, from a particular section of the estate. We taste dozens of lot samples each season and buy only a few. What happens after we buy one is less well known, so here is a typical week.

The tea arrives at our Park Street shop in foil-lined paper sacks, usually 20 to 35 kg each. The first job is to taste it again, side by side with the original sample, to make sure the delivered tea matches what we bought. About once a season it does not, and that lot goes back.

On Tuesdays, Partha and Rumki open the sacks on a long steel table in the back room. The tea is weighed straight into our pouches, using a broad steel scoop rather than a funnel, so the whole leaves of a Darjeeling are not broken. A 100 g pouch is filled in about 40 seconds; a whole morning gives around 400 pouches.

Each pouch is sealed with a heat sealer and labelled by hand with the region, the garden’s district, the flush, the packing date and the brewing guide. Unused tea goes back into its sack, which is closed and stored in a dry room with a dehumidifier running. We pack only what we expect to sell in the coming week. It is slower than packing a whole season at once, but it is why the tea in your pouch has spent so little time in the open air.