As I had earlier posted that we had to go a major overhaul of shifting from one server to another. My webmaster, Julian, recently finished the migration process. This blog too has been shifted and I thought I would give it a fresh new start.
First Flush 2008 Darjeeling teas were updated to our parent site, www.thunderbolttea.com, during the First Flush tea season, but I haven’t mentioned about it in any of the posts here. So here we go!
Stocks in Stock:
- Arya Ruby
- Castleton Special China
- Thurbo China Bloom
- Sungma Delight (ch)
- Margaret’s Hope Green (green tea)
- Arya FTGFOP1
- Risheehat Supreme (ch)
The First Flush this year was delayed a bit, but no worries, got hold of good First Flush Darjeeling teas. Keeping in mind the variety of customers we have, we always hunt for good quality teas with some cautious look on the price tag as well. If we invest more on a particular tea, the price tag will naturally be high for our tea buyers. So we try to procure the best which also does not have a cut-throat price tag as well. But when we look at exclusive Darjeeling tea varieties as Arya Ruby, there is no compromise on the price tag. If we don’t give a certain price per kg to the respective tea garden, the tea will be taken by another vendor. So you see…a tough competition. But in a way, I welcome competition as it makes you improve your services more and therefore better customer support and satisfaction.
One thing I would like to make clear here is that, clients have asked me - “The same tea cost us USD.. last year and this year it is USD…”. Well to answer that - Tea is such a buzz which does not stay static and keeps on changing - I am talking about the price factor. It all depends on the quality of tea produced on particular season which totally depends on the weather conditions, processing standards and tea maker timings.
Hope I have cleared some of your queries!
Good teas never last long on our site and its just been about 2 months and Arya Ruby is on the edge of extinction for one year. Don’t worry, next year, we will procure it again: ) Most of the First Flush teas procured this year is comparatively good and trying 100 grams of each could give you a choice of your liking. No matter how good a tea is, it all depends on the palate of an individual, his taste. Some may like the taste of a ‘medium price tag’ tea and some the most expensive one. Lucky are those who like the ‘medium price tag’ tea - don’t have to spend much - What do you say?
Anyways, I may have deviated here and there or altogether I suppose, but its not my fault entirely - blame it on my ‘think-box’.
June 27th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
once,in your post,you said that regarding FF tea you buy ‘clonals’ as it is just better.And I agree.Why then,this year there are mainly ‘china’ teas among your FF teas?
June 28th, 2008 at 12:35 am
Thank you for your comment! Yes, I still say, first flush teas would be clonals and there are several reasons why we opted for Arya Ruby only. Firstly, due to our client requirements and also the quality of teas we sampled out.
And there is no ‘hard and fast’ rule stating that clonals will be always better than the china grades: It all depends on the factors involved in the making of a particular tea, example weather, leaf quality, processing etc. Puttabong produced excellent Clonals last year, but the same tea grade samples they sent us however couldn’t win our hearts this year. So you can guess!
Its not that we haven’t bought any clonals and have literally discarded the clonal wing, we have bought but only the best. And the other factor is that, we couldn’t lay hands on a good clonal this year as the flush was delayed a bit and the real clonals couldn’t be up to the mark as we expected. The timing of seasons also highly affect the leaf quality and hence the overall quality of a processed tea. And the most important factor is the pricing of the teas, mediocre clonals were quoted very high when a better china grade was available for less - prices were high for the main reason that they were in less quantity. So being practical is important and we also wouldn’t be feeling good selling high priced teas with a mediocre quality, just because of the fact that it is a clonal and always thought to be better.
There are severallllllll other factors, technical as well as practical, which cannot be dealt with it here, because it is going to take a lot of time explaining and would be a pretty long answer. You too would be bored out at the end.
To summarize, the main reason is the late entry of First Flush this year which highly affected the leaf character and the clonals we sampled but not up to the mark as we expected as last year. A mediocre clonal was too highly priced when an equally good and even better china was available for less. Which one would you go for?
Hope we get good clonals during the next ff? We always hunt for clonals first! Now you may ask whether there were no good clonal produced this year - well there are 80+ tea gardens in Darjeeling located at different altitudes with different weather conditions and each tea garden would have atleast 10 varieties of tea each season - it would take months to sample all of them while they would have already been sold. There may be good clonals produced somewhere, but to track them all is impossible. We have a number of reputed tea gardens on our list which produce good teas and we deal with them. If some tea garden is interested in selling their teas, they send their samples and if we like it, we buy it.
June 28th, 2008 at 12:49 am
this is a perfect example of why I say, being a tea master is like attaining infinity. I said the clonals would be better and thats the fact when seen theoretically and according to situations faced, but see the weather conditions this year, the same clonals we loved last year could’t satisfy our olfactory this year. In a way the statement became contradictory. All I would say is “Tea is quite complicated” which depends on the weather, leaf quality, processing (tea maker) and the trade phenomenon. Less quantity doesn’t mean higher price. According to me, higher price should equal greater quality.
June 28th, 2008 at 7:57 am
Well, “tea master” is one of those titles and addresses that only others may use, but not oneself ;-).
So allow me to keep the discussion a notch lower, at the mere level of tea tasting. Most of the tasting as it done is a business, plain and simple; and most often it is merely a drab and dreary drudgery.
- There are the daily production tastings where you watch out for mistakes and flaws, not for quality. Boring but necessary.
- There are the constant blenders’ and brokers’ tastings, where hundreds of mediocre and bad CTCs are stacked against each other.
- There are the big international buyers’ tastings, where the question is not (not at all, ever) what the best tea is, but rather what is the cheapest tea at a still (halfway) acceptable quality level for your generic branded teabag that has to be filled in a cut-throat price competition.
Tea tasters in the industry frequently do not even _know_ how they would have to taste for quality, in the way how Mr. Banerjee had (hopefully) exemplified it to you. A quick spitting row of 20 over-stewed samples in seconds-sequence, repeated over and over again with more and more samples, does not allow anybody to assess a tea’s full quality and potential. Its only purpose is to rapidly single out what is obviously unfitting or below-level. I admit that I follow the same tasting path when in a hurry and having to cover many different wines in dragnet style, e.g. at a fair. The procedure is usually repeated in a second re-hash, to make up for errors or judgement and flaws, but I find myself quite reliable (reassuringly, *sigh*). But only after this almost mechanized coverage does *real* tasting begin.
Very few tea tasters exist in the trade and industry, who are able to assess a tea fully and comprehensively, like a good wine. It helps if you have come from another field; because narrow tea training “on the job” spoils you, instead of developing you. Just look at the badly under-develop thesaurus of tea-tasters and at their mostly quite inefficient language, very undescriptive and generic, and you see why they cannot come far; and in retrospect, wine tasting was on the same low level about, say, fourty or thirty years ago.
I have cited the standard of wine tasting as a well-fitting example in many respects, and as a benchmark to attain. Personally, I have also had the serendipitous advantage that my mother was a perfumer, so I have grown up already as a child with fragrance composition analysis and with comparative fragrance evaluation. But that is only helpful, not in any way necessary.
If you are interested in examples for excellent descriptive tasting, look at Anodyne’s tea notes in the Yahoo “Teamail” group / mailing list. Thomas Holz is also very good and has a wider horizon than any British buyer; unsurprisngly because consumer quality demands in Germany are much higher. And lastly I may point at my own tasting notes (the jack-ass standing at the end of the queue ;-).
Alexander Eichener
June 30th, 2008 at 10:52 am
Thanks again Alexander for taking the time to write and I guess, it took you some time. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for commenting on this blog and making your point.
I agree to some of your points and yes, tea tastings in auctions are a total business endeavour and they have to follow this trend because there are people who buy in bulk but not individual direct consumers as we have to deal with. Who does normally buy in auctions? Tea merchants like us and then we further bifurcate our business in terms of individual distribution which reaches the masses. Not to forget the fact that apart from the wholesale part, my tea company also deals with individual consumer base with the ecom feature on our site. So what really happens when you are dealing with direct tea consumers - You intereact with them directly and what have you got to do for increasing your customer list - simply - service and good quality product. That is why we go and do individual tasting in individual Darjeeling tea gardens and choose the best one. If we do a tasting as it is done in the auctions, we will be hammering our own feet.
To tell you the truth, the best tea can also get the lowest price if there is an understanding between the buyer, broker and the tea taster - in the auctions. For us, we simply are compelled to buy the best with quality, otherwise, we would not be having any buyers on our site - there would be no customer base at all.
Our clients are now used to having those high grade teas and if we settle for the less, think of the consequences. So Company reputation is important for us.
Yes, auction buyers will be interested in buying teas at a cheaper rate, but do you think they will buy anything that they get for the lowest price? They too will look for some quality. For me, quality matters, if not for me, but for my clients. I don’t know what the auction buyers have in mind, settling the for the cheapest tea or alike, but cheapest can also be the cheapest of quality. This I cannot buy or sell.
And regarding daily garden tea tasting, you have mentioned that they do it only for mistakes and flaws only and not for quality, please don’t mind but I quite don’t agree with you on this. Yes, a garden will want all of its teas to be sold at a higher cost, and for this what do you think they will have to do? They will have to compete with other gardens and bring out the best quality teas. So quality is important in the daily processings. Yes, mistakes and flaws are taken into consideration, but side by side quality is also assessed remarkably, otherwise, there would be no quality teas but only teas that were experimented for mistakes and flaws.
Direct sales note : ) - Have you tried any of our teas? - try about 100 grams of new 2008 teas, castleton muscatel is recommended! You will simply love this tea! I bet!
Could you make your comments short haha! : ) it took me a lot of time typing that - phew!!!! but yours is a longer one, so you win!! Will i every get a chance to do the real postings on my blog or just reply to comments!!!! Well, its great to have tea enthusiasts as yourself. Keep on posting and i will try to answer - i may not be prompt, but will try my best.
July 1st, 2008 at 5:47 am
Dear Benoy, Internet Explorer depicts the page strangely due to the red bar, am now commenting via Mozilla/Firefox.
Briefer you want me to be? Aye!
1. Thanks for long answer. Am glad I instigated you to continue creative writing ;-).
2. Small estates that center on high-quality orthodox teas may indeed have different tasting standard from a large CTC factory. Darjeeling is maybe blessed in this respect. So now is Kangra, with Abhai Kumar Singh as tea quality missionary.
3. The parallel to wine goes very far and very deep. The includes tasting styles and limitations. I have only sampled very few Indian wines, more rum (the famous “Old Monk”, but also Sikkim rum, the state’s other well-known export commodity besides Temi tea and cardamon).
4. Question: do you know anything about the present state of the Sikkimese Sang-Martam small teagrowers’ cooperative? Do they still make Rumtek tea?
5. I am right now looking out for a possibly interesting new Nagaland tea estate and factory. Don’t want to divert the topic from “Gorkhaland” though (ahem), only pointing out that I am always eager to compare. My other tea leg stands in Africa (Kenya).
Best regards, Alexander Eichener