ORGANIC ASSAM your morning kick in the shorts

taste profile: A full-bodied, dark, malty brew from the birthplace of tea.

our garden: The turbulent Brahmaputra River runs through Assam. This is where Indian tea was born. Assam is naturally gifted. A tropical climate and fertile alluvial soil makes it ideal for tea cultivation. The world’s largest tea growing areas are found here. Assam’s tea plants are large-leafed and their strong liquors sparkle.

The Banaspaty Garden is in tribal heartland. Banaspaty literally means flora, fauna and trees – all dear to a tribal’s heart. The weekly market here is fascinating, offering indigenously crafted, ethnic products.

To brew loose-leaf: Bring fresh, filtered water to a boil. Warm your tea pot — your mother would approve. Use 1 level teaspoon per cup. Steep 4-5 minutes, remove leaves and serve. Enjoy with milk and honey.

To brew tea bag: Bring fresh, filtered water to a boil. Make your mother proud — warm your tea pot or cup before dunking your bag. Steep 4-5 minutes for the ideal cuppa. Enjoy with milk and honey.

ORGANIC DARJEELING the perfect nooner

taste profile: Rich aroma, strong character, mild muscatel flavour.

our gardens: Seeyok, on the Indo Nepal border, faces the lovely Rongbong Valley, and lies in the shade of the majestic Mount Kanchenjunga. Mirik, a tourist’s delight, is just 8 km away.

Floods swept away Seeyok’s earlier tea factory, but its new factory’s first flush teas fetch Seeyok a high premium. Seeyok has won the World Tea Association’s award for the best tea in the world.

To brew loose-leaf: Bring fresh, filtered water to a boil. Warm your tea pot — your mother would approve. Use 1 level teaspoon per cup. Steep 3-5 minutes, remove leaves and serve. Enjoy with honey.

To brew tea bag: Bring fresh, filtered water to a boil. Make your mother proud — warm your tea pot or cup before dunking your bag. Steep 3-4 minutes for the ideal cuppa. Enjoy with honey.

ORGANIC EARL GREY a cracking cuppa

taste profile: Bright, brisk liquor with a light clear flavour. A delicately scented blend from two of our finest gardens.

our gardens: Our Earl Grey blends tea from the Seeyok (above) and the Putharjhora Garden Estates. Putharjhora literally means “stone-streams”. Here, foothills melt into plains. Swift flowing rivers flank the garden, and anglers find the fishing good. Wild elephants love it and come calling from the Bhutan hills. Putharjhora’s CTC teas have a creamy smoothness, and are the choice of millions.

To brew loose-leaf: Bring fresh, filtered water to a boil. Warm your tea pot — your mother would approve. Use 1 level teaspoon per cup. Steep 3-5 minutes, remove leaves and serve. Enjoy with milk and honey.

To brew tea bag: Bring fresh, filtered water to a boil. Make your mother proud — warm your tea pot or cup before dunking your bag. Steep 3-4 minutes for the ideal cuppa. Enjoy with milk and honey.

ORGANIC MASALA CHAI the downward dog of tea

taste profile: A warm soothing spicy cup. Fragrant with organically-grown black tea, green cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and peppercorns.

about chai: We combine tea from the Putharjhora Garden Estate (above) and locally-grown spices to produce our outstanding masala chai (literally “mixture of spices” and “tea”).

Traditional masala chai is a mixture of sweet and savoury spices that are ground and boiled in water. Black tea is then added to the spice mixture, which is steeped to preference, strained, then combined with milk and sweetened with honey. A sweetener is necessary in masala chai to bring out the robust flavours of the spices. In India, masala chai is prepared at home but is also available wherever people gather such as on trains, at bus stations and in marketplaces by street vendors called “wallahs” who call out “chai!” The wallahs serve the chai in low-fired clay cups called “chullarhs” that they make on open fires.

To brew loose-leaf: Bring fresh, filtered water to a boil, add chai mixture, (1 tsp. per cup) and steep 8-9 minutes. Add milk (at a ratio of one part milk to three parts tea) and heat up to a near boil. Strain and serve with loads of yummy honey.

To brew tea bag: Bring fresh, filtered water to a boil. Make your mother proud — warm your tea pot or cup before dunking your bag. Steep 3-4 minutes for the ideal cuppa. Enjoy with plenty of milk and honey.

ORGANIC DARJEELING GREEN the all-day good cup

taste profile: Lightly caffeinated, rich in antioxidants and honey gold. Delicate, sweet and nutty. Organically grown and hand picked high in the Himalayas.

About green tea: Grown on the Seeyok Garden Estate (above), our Darjeeling green tea skips the oxidizing step taken to process black tea. Instead, the tea leaves are plucked, steamed or pan fried (which removes the fermentation enzymes), rolled, and then dried. This process yields a chemical composition in green tea similar to the fresh tea leaf.

To brew loose-leaf: Bring fresh, filtered water to a near boil. Warm your tea pot — your mother would approve. Use 1 level teaspoon per cup. Steep 2 minutes, remove leaves and serve. No milk, no sugar, no funny business.

To brew tea bag: Bring fresh, filtered water to a near boil. Make your mother proud — warm your tea pot or cup before dunking your bag. Steep 2 minutes for the ideal cuppa. No milk, no sugar, no funny business.

• We are committed to giving our garden workers, and their families, a better quality of life.
• We have set up a high school for 250 children at our garden in Samebeong. This caters to all children in the region. Scholarships are awarded to meritorious students.
• We have built community centres – with colour TV, facilities for indoor games, and utensils the community can freely use. We provide clean drinking water. We arrange for treatment by visiting doctors.
• We give loans to purchase cows. Children get to drink milk, while workers sell cow-dung to our gardens and earn extra money.
• We tap alternate energy sources to provide solar lighting and biogas connections.
• Our Mothers’ Club enlightens women on family planning, guides them through maternity and counsels them on childcare.
• Our sewing classes have given women an additional income earning opportunity. Our stipends have created job opportunities in nursing, midwifery and technical trades.
• We set up small credit funds. These finance small entrepreneur programs– like mushroom cultivation and honey harvesting. Easy loans also help workers meet their many personal commitments.
• A Central Composting Unit trains workers to prepare quality compost in their kitchen gardens and sell this back to our estates.
• We look out for simple ways to improve working conditions. We have developed a part for worker’s children, erected a bus stand with protective overhead shades for commuters and constructed a house for handicapped persons.

At Samabeong, our workers are in the garden's "managing committee". They directly decide on garden matters together with the garden manager. This makes a clean break with tea garden tradition.

All our gardens are slowly going the Samabeong way. Our workers are more participative, with genuine opportunities for representation and collective bargaining.

We are associated with various small farmer initiatives.

Mineral Springs, Darjeeling

We helped workers reclaim the abandoned Mineral Springs tea garden in Darjeeling. Today, they have access to European markets.
Many displaced workers had turned to producing milk, marketing this in Darjeeling Town through Samjukta Vikas Cooperative (SVC). Our project rehabilitated these workers as small farmers growing organic tea – after helping them recover existing tea bushes.
We now provide these farmers technical know-how, teach them to plant new tea, arrange small farmers’ organic certification and process the teas at our Selimbong factory.
The Mineral Springs small farmers’ teas are the only multi-cropping, cooperative based organic teas sold from Darjeeling.

Project Tea Action

We motivate Gitubling and Nokdara marginal farmers to convert part of their land to grow organic tea.
Few farmers here can access regular markets – communications are poor, road links barely exist. Invariably, they fall into the clutches of middlemen. With Region Community Development Committee (RCDC) – a local NGO – we help farmers find a way out.
Our animators spread out and educate the farmers. Tea, we tell them, is a sustainable crop, giving higher returns than crops they now grown. We assure – and provide – our technical support. Farmers now source tea plants from us. And are quickly seeing promised results.

Peermade, Kerala

We offer small farmers in Idduki, Kerala, our expertise in organic methods. By this, we assist Peermade Development Society (PDS), which conducts various development programs in the region. Earlier, harmful cultivation practices, including the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizer, had severely damaged Idduki soil.
We also provide technical consultancy to PDS, and are building a factory for them. Financed by the European Union (EU), this factory will help small farmers process the organic tea they produce.

We have an ecological development plan for each tea garden. These involve:

• planting various kinds of trees – bukhain, utish, texus baccata, magnolia, etc. These are wind barriers on hilltops and soil fortifiers in landslide prone areas.
• growing weeping love grass, Guatemala grass and legumes at strategic points, and checking soil erosion through their soil binding effect.
• channelling monsoon water flow through contour drainage and conserving top soil.
• developing small forest blocks, in wasteland patches, as firewood sources for workers. The effect is a natural ambience. Gardens develop an inner rhythm and steadily move towards ecological harmony.

Most organic tea cultivation processes are heavily labour intensive. Painstaking manual effort – skillfully and sensitively applied – is required on an ongoing basis. This makes organic tea expensive to grow.

We have adopted biodynamic practices. We use small doses of herbs like oak-bark, yarrow, chamomile, valerian and stinging nettle to prepare biodynamic solutions. These help the earth harness helpful cosmic forces, release them into garden soil and make it vibrant and living.

Tea plants have a rhythm and respond decisively to lunar cycles. A waning moon – with weak sap flow and root centred plant activity – is ideal for transplanting, pruning, composting and cultivating. An ascending moon – when plant forces flow strongly upward – is ideal for sowing seeds, harvesting and applying liquid manure.

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