ON BEING A TEA TASTER – The Moderate Voice

By Amit Bose

From cultivation to cup, tea is a multi-billion-dollar business. Professional tea tasters are a crucial part of it. Drawing on our extensive training and industry knowledge, we ensure that only the tastiest teas sold at the best price points reach tea lovers the world over.

I have worked as a tea taster for over half a century now. My breadth and depth of expertise make me one of the handful of old masters in the field.

To become a connoisseur of tea, I made it my life. To this day, when I am awake, it consumes my thoughts. When I am asleep, I dream about it.

I grew up in Darjeeling, a famous tea-growing region in India, but it took moving some 4,000 miles away from my home to London as a young man for me to realize that I wanted to pursue a career in this industry.

Breaking into the tea business was not easy, especially because I was not born into it.

l can still remember sitting down at my very first interview at a tea broker. When asked if my family owned tea gardens, I responded honestly: “No, sir.”

In that case, the interviewer told me, he could not impart this specialty training to me.

Fortunately, my next interview was with one of the top tea brokerage firms in London: George White, Sanderson (Tea) Limited. There, the director, Mr. Timothy Carter, surprised me by speaking to me in Bengali, my mother tongue. It turned out that he had lived in Kolkata for 15 years. After he learned that I had hitchhiked my entire way to London (a story unto itself), he was so impressed that he called out to his assistant and told him, “This young man from India will start work next Monday!”

Mr. Carter became like a godfather to me. He advised me to study in the evenings and get my MBA so I would get shipping, warehouse, and banking knowledge in addition to the knowledge I was getting as a tea tasting trainee. That way, he promised, I would be equipped to open a tea business of my own in India one day.

I devoted myself to the work, learning about different varieties of teas from gardens all over the world—India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Turkey, Argentina, Africa, China, Vietnam and beyond—to develop my eye and palate so I would be able to discern whether lots up for sale at tea auctions were worth buying and at what price point.

At a typical tea auction, tasters sample teas in a dedicated room where rows of cups are laid out for us. Our evaluation is multi-faceted. First we assess the dry tea leaves, paying attention to their size, color, shape, and aroma. For instance: Are the tea leaves too small or too big for the blend? If a tea goes through CTC (where tea leaves are crushed, torn, and curled into tiny balls), we need to keep an eye out for excess fiber. If the tea is made the traditionally processed way, which keeps the leaves intact, we look for visible sticks. Anything but the leaf itself will detract from a tea’s flavor. Once the water hits the tea, we pay attention to details like how the leaves unfurl, what coloring they adopt, and what aromas they produce. And of course, we taste the liquid itself, observing the different flavor notes, the feel, weight, and texture of it in our mouths, and whether it leaves any residual aftertaste. All of this information helps us determine the quality of any given tea and the amount we are willing to bid for it.

This is intensive work. I remember at one point in my career, I worked at Brooke Bond Lipton India Limited, one of the world’s biggest tea companies. There I tasted and retasted entire auction catalogues daily, which amounted to evaluating 700 to 800 cups a day!

Mr. Carter’s prediction that I would open a tea company of my own eventually proved true. I now run Hankow Teas of London in Kolkata with my brilliant niece, Sreedarshini Mitra, who serves as its CEO. We are a manufacturer, wholesaler, and exporter of loose and packaged teas with more than 100 distributors across India. Our retail brand, Sweet Heart, is available in more than 12,000 retail shops.

It has been an honor to pass down what I know to her. Tasting is something that you cannot learn in the textbook. You need someone to mentor you. When I was first starting out at George White, Sanderson, I always attended auctions with senior tasters, who evaluated the tea before me. That way they could tell me, hey, look, this tea is strong or weak, or whatever else they have observed that is worth noting.

Now, when my niece and I go tasting, I am the one who samples a cup first and shares my observations with her.

I see a lot of myself in my niece. She is very strict with herself, a disciplinarian, which is how I know she will survive in this industry, because tea requires nothing short of your full dedication. You must live for the work.

Over the years, I have had the wonderful privilege of tasting tea across the world from London, Hamburg, and Almaty to Hong Kong and Iceland. Now, as I approach six decades of a life in tea, I still cannot get enough of it. I have traveled the world tasting tea.

I drink tea in the evenings and after breakfast and at any social gatherings I attend. My favorite tea is Earl Gray because of the good, soothing effect and wonderful taste it produces. I prefer to drink it straight, without milk or sugar.

Whenever someone learns I am a tea taster, I have found that they become wary about what kind of tea to offer me. I always say it does not matter: Whatever you have in the house, not a problem. I am happy to drink what is given to me. It is just a cup of tea, after all, and I always want to be respectful to my host. When they ask my opinion about a cup of tea, however, that is another story …

Amit Bose is a tea taster and the chief executive at Hankow Batchelor Tea Co Ltd. This was written for Zócalo Public Square.