How to make tea

Fran Abrams Tuesday June 25, 2002 The Guardian

There are few things more quintessentially English than a cup of Twinings Traditional
Afternoon tea. But the tale of these teabags begins a world away from your kettle. In
the second of her investigations into the manufacture of 'British' products, Fran
Abrams traces the story back to a plantation in the hills of Sri Lanka

It's pouring with rain and the taxis are coughing out little bursts of blue fug as they
inch along the Strand. It is nice and dry in the Twinings shop, though, and inside the
smell of tea is sweet and inviting. It's a long, narrow corridor of a shop and its walls
are lined with black and gold boxes. Half way down, on the right, is the perfect tea for
a day like today.

"By Appointment to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Tea and Coffee Merchants R
Twining and Co Ltd, London," it says at the top of the box. The name of the blend is
picked out in green: Traditional Afternoon.

This is a bright, copper-coloured tea; brisk and refreshing. "Ideal as an afternoon

pick-me-up or whenever you need revitalising," it says on the box. "Fifty Tea Bags. A
blend of Ceylon, Assam and Kenyan teas."

When Thomas Twining first began selling tea from this shop in 1706, a decent Pekoe
went out of the door for about £3 per kilo, a phenomenal sum at the time. The price
has gone up a bit since then. Our box of Traditional Afternoon will set us back £1.70
for 125 gram of tea; £13.60 per kilo.

It's mid afternoon in London but five-and-a-half-thousand miles away on the Moray
Estate in Maskeliya, Sri Lanka, it is evening, and Sivalinga Ambiga is helping her two
sons with their homework. Before bed she will iron their school uniforms - she is
lucky because unlike some of her neighbours she has electricity in her small, single-
storey estate house high on the mountain. Outside in the dark a breeze ruffles the
waist-high carpet of tea that covers every hillside, and Ambiga can hear the distant
roar of a waterfall cascading into the reservoir below. Part of what used to be the
estate is under water now, and when it's very dry the abandoned houses rise slowly
from their graves.

It won't be long before Ambiga turns in: she gets up at 5am to cook breakfast for her
family before starting work in the tea garden at 7.30am. Ambiga is expected to pick
19 kilos of tea a day, gathering the leaves in both hands as she moves slowly along
the hillside between the carefully-pruned rows. As she works she braces a huge
wicker basket on her back, holding it in place with a strap across her forehead. "I was
born and brought up on this estate," she says. "I went away to school but I came
back to marry my husband, Jayaraman Murthi. He lived here, and so I was very
happy to come back."

Ambiga, who is 25, is four months pregnant with her third child. She has never seen,
let alone tasted, Traditional Afternoon tea. She takes home about 90p a day, so our
box would cost her almost two days' wages. Once it has been dried and processed,
her daily output weighs about five kilos. So put another way, Ambiga is paid two
pence to pick the amount of tea needed to fill our £1.70 box.
Does she ever take a tea break? She and the other women laugh shyly, then they
produce a bottle of tea, with milk and sugar, from which they sip while they work the
hillsides. They drink five or six cups a day, they say.

While the women pluck, the men prune, weed and spray. About 15% of the estate's
expenditure goes on pesticides and weedkillers. There seems to be a different bottle
for every ill. The men wear the gallon-sized plastic bottles like knapsacks on their
backs, but they don't choose to wear the protective clothing the estate provides,
working instead in thin trousers and, like their wives, in bare feet.

School finishes at 2pm and in the afternoons Ambiga's sons, seven-year-old

Vinoshan and five-year-old Gagendran, often help with the plucking. At busy times of
the year every pair of hands is needed, for the estate is suffering from labour
shortages. Ten years ago there were 1,400 workers here; now there are just 1,200.
In the 1920s, when the British founded the estate, these Tamil workers were little
more than slave labour, the estate superintendent, Rajiv Bandaranayake, tells me.
Now children growing up here can leave, and many of them choose to do so. Some
go to garment factories or into domestic service in the Gulf states; a few have even
gone to university with the support of the estate.

Bandaranayake, like many of the top people in tea, was born to the job. His father
was a tea planter when the British were running these estates, and his bulky form
spreads comfortably into the big armchair in his airy lounge. There is a huge bay
window with view over a carefully-tended garden to the mountains beyond. But
although the colonial-style manager's bungalow remains, things have changed, he
says. The estate now offers maternity leave and a clinic to its employees, and the
owners would like to do more to improve the workers' ramshackle tin-roofed
accommodation which, he admits, is substandard.

There are a number of different catalysts for change. Some workers choose to leave;
others choose to stay and demand better conditions. Last year there were riots here,
during a strike over pay which went on for a month. At one stage the water pipes to
Bandaranayake's bungalow were cut and he feared for the safety of his family as
angry workers circled the house.

"They wanted to kill us. Our lives were really in danger," he says smiling, as the
lunchtime sun hits the floor at his feet. "We really had a lot of violence. Now both
sides have realised fighting isn't the answer. Wages can only go up if our companies
can make money."

The plantation workers were angry because their counterparts in the garment sector
had been given a cost-of-living allowance of 400 rupees, about £2.85, per month.
The plantation management companies said their workers weren't entitled to any
more because they already had their own collective agreements. In the end the
employers agreed to pay an "attendance allowance" of 150 rupees, £1.07, per month
to workers who turned up for more than 75 days out of every 100, and the trouble
subsided.

And so the plantation workers of Maskeliya are back at work, plucking the tea and
transporting it down the hill to the estate's processing plant where it can be dried,
rolled, fermented and then baked before being packed in large brown paper
packages. But there are other clouds on the horizon. Though Moray produces some
of the best teas in the Dimbula region and its price is kept high, the price of tea
across the world is being forced down as new and bigger players flood the market
with cheap, mass-produced leaves. Vietnam, for example, has become a serious tea
producer in recent years. Uganda has increased its production by 20% since 1995.
Even the tea trade, already international in its habits, is not immune to the effects of
globalisation.

At the Tea Tang company, which buys for Twinings in Colombo, Sri Lanka's capital,
there is dark wood panelling and an air of tradition - although the company is only 30
years old. There is a great deal of mystique about tea, about its blending, its tastes,
its habit of changing with the weather. There's a romance, a sense of some lingering
Victorian propriety, about the trade. If you work in the upper echelons of this
business, you are emphatically "in" tea.

But at Colombo's weekly tea auction, the conceit evaporates. Here, every
Wednesday, the Colombo tea buyers gather in a sparse, utilitarian auditorium with
hard cash in mind, all their attention focussed on the auctioneer's gushing stream of
words. In December last year, when our tea might well have been sold, the average
price of tea at the weekly auction in Colombo was around £1.07 per kilo. A year
earlier, it was £1.21.

But whatever the price, the taste must stay the same. This is one of the golden rules
of the tea business - its art is to cut out the seasonal variations, the differences in
taste brought about by soil conditions or weather. And so in an airy room with dark
wood glass-fronted cupboards at the Tea Tang headquarters, Chandana de Silva
blends half a dozen different teas to recreate a flavour set by Twinings. Does he like
to drink Traditional Afternoon? His face is a picture of anxiety mixed with distaste.
No, he says, he doesn't. He prefers the Classic Blend, which is stronger.

Perhaps some of our tea was in blend number 1,970, put together here on December
4 2001. A hundred packages of 58 kilos each, shipped to Felixstowe on December
27 by the Hanjin Shipping Company. They arrived in Britain on January 15 and were
taken by road to Twinings' headquarters at Andover.

From this point on, of course, the story starts to get more complex. For the Ceylon
tea in the Traditional Afternoon makes up less than half the total weight of tea. And if
Sri Lanka is eyeing the tea prices with concern, Assam and Kenya, where prices are
already lower, have much more to fear.

Between December 2000 and December 2001, the average price of Indian tea fell
from £1.05 to 94p per kilo, and already the tea planters in Assam are predicting
disaster. A series of floods during the past 25 years have caused the loss of large
areas of tea plantation on the Brahmaputra plains. Infrastructure in the region is poor,
quality has been suffering and some major customers have pulled out of the region.

"A decline in domestic quality has led to a crash in prices, triggering off the worst
crisis in the past century for the Indian tea industry," says Aboni Borgohain, chairman
of the Tea Research Association and a planter in Assam. "The backbone of the
industry could be broken."

But in Sri Lanka, eyes turn to Kenya when apportioning blame for the slump in prices.
After all, the African country is the fourth largest biggest producer of tea after China,
India and Sri Lanka. While Ceylon tea is produced by expensive traditional methods,
in which the machines gently rub the tea leaves to release the flavour (this used to be
done by hand), it is whispered that in Kenya they use CTC - cut, tear and curl.
Instead of rubbing the leaves gently, the machines chop them up and grind them;
which means the end flavour may be noticeably harsher. One senior figure in the tea
business describes the process as "mincing". After only a second or two he recovers
his composure and asks not to be quoted. After all, tea is a gentleman's trade.

But Kenya, where the bulk of our Traditional Afternoon comes from, is feeling the
pinch too. In Mombasa the price of tea has dropped from £1.40 per kilo a year ago to
about £1 today. One of the companies from which Twinings buys is Williamson Tea
Kenya, whose managing director is Nigel Sands-Lumsdaine. The problem is simple,
he says, and it is the same everywhere. Too much tea, too few customers.

"Consumption has been increasing by 1% per annum while production has been
growing by 2% per annum, and I think that says it all," he says. "I don't think we are
optimistic that it will improve from current levels, with Vietnam planting more and
more tea and China as a somewhat unknown quantity."

And like everywhere else, it isn't easy to improve labour standards when money is
tight. When health researchers from Kenya's Moi University visited Tinderet, one of
the tea estates from which Twinings buys tea for the Traditional Afternoon blend,
they found workers there were forced to live with contaminated water supplies and
too few pit latrines. They also noted unhealthy levels of noise and dust in the factory,
and said the workers' protective clothing was inadequate. They added, though, that
there was a medical dispensary on the estate.

In the tea-blending department at Andover, all these troubles seem very far away.
Here all is light and air, and as you climb the stairs your senses are assailed first by a
fruity smell, then a punch of lapsang souchong, then by the sweeter aroma of black
tea. In a drawer near the far end of the tasting room, where copper kettles boil on gas
rings and tasters spit into bins with relish, is our blend. Encased in a small silver-
coloured tin, with a piece of paper spelling out all its details: blended here, February
11 2002.

This process of blending and tasting is a continual one, each batch tasted against the
last and against a "reserve" to check for consistency. The blender is Michael Wright,
who came to Twinings as a graduate trainee 13 years ago. Every few weeks he
takes samples from each of the constituent teas and adjusts the recipe before
sending a consignment by road up to Twinings' teabag factory in Newcastle. Ceylon
for flavour. Assam for strength. Kenyan for body.

The job is a delight, Wright says. Unlike many others in the trade, he does not have
tea in his genes. "I didn't even know tea buyers existed till I came here. I was very
lucky. You tend to spend a lot of time talking about your job, because people are so
fascinated by it."

While Wright is new to the business, Twinings' corporate communications manager is

Stephen Twining, whose family is now in its 10th generation in the tea business.
Twinings is owned by Associated British Foods, one of a handful of conglomerates
that own most of Britain's food and drink trade, but it keeps its links with the Twining
family. There is still a Twinings way of doing things. It's about responsibility, Twining
says.

"I've been asked how I sleep at night when I'm exploiting people in the third world.
But we take responsibility for who we are and what we are. You could argue that it's
miles behind the times, but the thing that helps me sleep is that I know it's going to
be a long, slow, continuous process. There's work to be done, but it is being done
and that is very positive."

The story of our tea does not end here. Now our teas have met, they must be united
in a cocoon of packaging. According to some estimates, packaging can make up as
much as four fifths of the cost of a packet of teabags. And so to Lydney in
Gloucestershire, to JR Crompton Ltd, the world's biggest manufacturer of tea-bag
paper.

Actually "paper" is a bit of a misnomer. Paper falls to pieces when it gets wet, and so
paper alone will not do for teabags. Our bags are what is known as "superseal",
which is a mix of rayon - a product made of wood pulp and caustic soda - and
polypropylene, a by-product of the oil industry. The polypropylene is provided by the
Fina oil company's plant in Belgium, and the whole is wrapped around with a casing
of paper from trees grown in Scandinavia and North America. For each tonne of
paper made, about 50 kilos of discarded pulp goes into landfill sites.

Then, of course, there are the boxes. Twinings has done away with the polythene
shrink-wrapping that covers most boxes of teabags - it looks naff, the marketing
people hint. And so our box is a two-layered affair, the first layer coated with a
varnish to seal in the tea, the second printed with the gold and green design. The
card comes from pine and birch trees in Finland but the printing is done in
Maidenhead.

All these constituent parts meet at Twinings' factory in north Tyneside, a huge shed
of a place crouched on an industrial estate near where the shipyards used to be. In
the UK, of course, labour is expensive and much of the work is done by machine.
There are machines to mix the tea, machines to make the bags, even machines to
pack the boxes together into bundles of 12.

The production manager, Richard Cotton, takes our box of teabags and reads the
identifying code. He goes away and comes back with a date and time: February 27,
19.05pm. Line 51. There were three people on that line on the afternoon shift that
day, he says. Sharon Ellis, Anne Davison and Lynn Lumley. Mostly they keep an eye
on the machines, checking for problems.

Ellis is in today, as it happens, which is unusual because workers here do five-hour

shifts instead of the usual eight, and these three women start at five. Ellis has been
here for nine years, always on line 51. Why move? The pay is good - around £6 an
hour which is more than most factories around here. And the women on the
afternoon shift have a laugh. They like to seek out Cotton on their nights out in
Whitley Bay and embarrass him into buying them a drink. Something a little stronger
than tea, of course.

"When I first started here there were seven lasses on the line," Ellis says. "Now
they're getting all this hi-tech machinery they don't need so many. I think it's easier
now, actually. When I first applied for the job I didn't get it but my sister-in-law worked
here and I knew I could do it. So I just kept on applying until they took me. I like the
lasses I work with. At Christmas we sing rugby-club versions of carols."

And so our tea, gathered thousands of miles away by the likes of Ambiga, haggled
over at auction, blended, shipped around the world, blended again then wrapped,
boxed and re-boxed, is on the move for the last time. Down the motorway to a
warehouse in Warwickshire, then on to the Strand. Where, right now, it is being
dropped into a handsome black-and-gold carrier bag along with a receipt for £1.70.
Outside, not too far away, is a stop for the number 59 bus. Which takes us to where
the kettle is. Time for a brew. After all, it's been a long journey.

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