Journey of the Tea from plantation to your home

On our trip to Munnar which is home to a huge tea plantation, we learnt the whole process of how tea gets made and because it was very educational I have decided to share that experience and knowledge here. The tea factory we visited is situated at Kolukamalai at a heigh of 8000+ ft above sea level. The journey to the factory was very treacherous with only a Jeep being able to make it. The breath taking view from the top compensated more than enough for the hardship of the journey. The Tea factory made our whole journey really worthwhile experience

The Tea plant is allowed to grow to a height of about 2 ft from the ground. Once it reaches that height, the new leaves get picked and because of which the plant always stays about that high.

Mostly women pick these leaves by a simple instrument that looks like a pair of shears with which when brought together will form a box that collects all the leaves as they are cut. The leaves are then transferred over to the bag that they carry on their backs.






The next step is sorting of the leaves and putting them in nylon bags.









These leaves are then brought to the factory where they are first put on a huge belt and hot air is pumped from beneath. This reduces the moisture content by 50%.








The leaves then are dropped from a chute and go into a grinder which chops up the leaves. This process is called crushing.








From here they go on to a sieve where the finer chopped leaves are separated from the coarser ones. The coarser ones go back into the grinding machine.

The finer part is now spread out on the floor and allowed to oxidise for about 3 hrs.





The next step is another machine which dries the oxidised tea. Again at this step some waste matter is removed or sent back to the previous step.








After drying, it goes into a machine which consists of several cylinders and each of them makes it little finer and send the good tea to the next step cylinder while the not so good part gets collected on the side. This not so good part is bagged and sold at a very cheap price.






By now the tea is nearly ready for consumption. The next step is quality control which separates the tea by its size using a series of seives. Each of them is bagged separately and sent to the stores for final consumption.

The interesting part of this education was that this was something that I had no clue about and the whole process seems extremely simple and can be done without any machinary if need be.