Read part 1 here

The day starts early on tea estates and with another day of driving ahead visiting tea estates we

need to get going. It is an hour on unmade up road to get to the smooth tarmacked highway which

is the main route to Zambia. Then we zoom along through land which is parched dry. Suddenly

through the trees there is a splash of the brightest Technicolor yellowy green. This is clonal tea

which came about 25 years or so ago when nursery men trying to find the best traditional seedlings

to plant realised that the process could be speeded up and improved by taking cuttings from the

most productive and best quality bushes – this clonal tea process has transformed the business of

tea growing in Africa.

We turn off the road and drive through the flattest field of tea I have ever seen. The rains have

not arrived yet so in order to maintain some level of production irrigation is being used. This is tea

production at its most efficient – flat land, new clonal planting, water and machines in the distance

plucking. The men and women operating the plucking machines like working in this way. They earn

more money and it is much less back-breaking work.

This is the future of tea for most of the world’s tea production. It might seem less romantic than

tea pluckers on misty hillsides but even if this is what people call agribusiness the same passion for

producing excellent quality tea still exists on this estate which in addition is certified Fairtrade.

The quest for quality is obvious in the tea factory where the CTC production is a complicated and

finely tuned process. The price the tea will fetch depends on the expertise with which it is produced.

There is a great attention to detail and once the leaf is fired and more recognisably tea it is picked

up to smell and test its feel. The smell is overwhelmingly sweet and pungent. After viewing the

factory, teas are tasted with typically noisy slurpings and spittings. Discussions follow about the tea’s

manufacture, its quality and potential markets.

Then it is on to the next factory 2 hours away which is owned by the same people – here they make

traditional black tea as well as speciality varieties and herbal infusions. The fields look more like a

traditional estate with rolling hills and it is certified Organic and Fairtrade. Even here they are talking

about low level mechanisation with the pluckers using shears with a plastic container to catch the

tea as it is cut. We taste some tea but there is not much activity in the factory because the rains

haven’t come yet. We go out into the fields to see how the herbal infusions, camomile and mint are

grown.

The day ends with a 3 to 4 hour drive back. This gives me time to reflect that these two estates

perfectly illustrate something which the tea bag bashers tend to ignore; which is that the absolute

attention to detail, the knowledge and enthusiasm as well as the desire to make the best product

possible can be found just as easily on an estate producing CTC grades for the tea bag market as on

an estate manufacturing speciality tea.