Darjeeling by Jeff Koehler

conditions of the weather and leaves.
    “We do it to see what we can do better,” said Vijay Dhancholia at Marybong. “It’s for tomorrow ’s batches.” While his heavy mustache has gone a touch gray and his hair begun to thin during almost forty years ofworking on tea estates in Darjeeling, his daily tastings remain unchanged and fundamental to his work as a tea maker. Each day, alongside the factory manager, he closely samples the batches that have been withered overnight and processed that morning.
    Estates have a tasting room set aside. Marybong’s is in a corner of the factory, like an attached, glassed-walled office. So is Glenburn’s, though it’s right at the entrance of the building. In Castleton’s, various certifications, framed newspaper articles, and four world-record certificates it achieved between 1989 and 1992 hang on the wall above stacks of upturned tasting cups. Goomtee’s tasting room is separated from the sorting room by a door and looks out over a deep cleft of hills. Jungpana’s is a couple of steps away, among offices perched on a blunt precipice above the valley below. The tasting room at Makaibari is in the top of a small, two-story building facing the factory, whose shiny silver-and-green roof dominates the view and whose steady hum pierces the windows. At Thurbo it’s a separate hut, with shiny white tiles and wood paneling giving it the feel of a bar in a slightly outdated European ski resort.
    Each of these rooms is uncluttered, painted in white, and contains a long, white-tiled counter that is a touch over waist high so the taster need not unduly bend over. Above is a wall of north-facing windows that provide good, even light, the kind that portrait photographers look for, or those shooting food for cookbooks: steady, clean, and diffused, offering balanced, true colors. Such light is important since tasting tea is as much about using the eyes as the nose and mouth.
    A half hour or so before the tasting begins, an assistant begins setting out small infusion pots and cups in a straight line along the counter, one pair for each of the day’s batches. The white porcelain cups show off best a tea’s color when “cupping” it, as professionals call tea tasting. The white rims have been worn down, revealing earthy, reddish clay beneath the glaze. But they are spotlessly clean, with no trace of residual odors. Faint cracks stained black from years of tea spread around the inside of the cups like a fine netting.
    The infusion pots are white, ceramic, and individual-size and hold, if filled to the brim, 180 ml (¾ cup) of liquid. Most are small, handleless pitchers with short spouts and a fitted lid with an inset rim, Indian-made and bought in one of the wholesale shops on a side street near the Tea Board of India headquarters in Kolkata. The other style, made in Sri Lanka, is more expensive but smoother. Instead of a spout, these have five sharp, V-shaped notches like the jagged teeth of a Halloween pumpkincarved by a seven-year-old. The matching cups of both versions are almost perfectly spherical and also without handles, akin to small, white tea bowls.
    A foil packet or a little, round metal tin behind each holds a small amount of dry leaf. Lying atop the leaves is a slip of paper that identifies by number and letter codes the batch, grade, leaf type, and amounts. These can be checked in a ledger to find out the section of origin in the garden and the precise timings of withering, rolling, fermentation, and firing.
    With an electric silver kettle filled and heating, the assistant takes a portable, brass, handheld balance scale and begins working down the line of infusion pots like Lady Justice, measuring out a generous pinch of dry tea leaves in one tray so that it equals the weight of the other, which holds an old Indian twenty-five-paise coin weighing precisely 2.5 grams (just a touch over one twelfth of an ounce, or a smidge more than an American dime), the customary counterbalance