The Apprentice - How I Learned Tea Tasting.

By Divya Puri

I did not choose tea. Tea, I have come to believe, Tea chose me — and it began its work considerably earlier than I understood at the time.

I was born in 1971 at Thurbo Tea Estate, where my father was posted under the legendary planter Harish Mukia. I spent my earliest years being moved between the hills and the estates as postings demanded — Darjeeling for schooling, the Dooars for holidays, Vernon Lodge as the constant, the anchor, the place that was always home regardless of where my father had been sent that year.

(Picture of our home Vernon Lodge in Darjeeling)

By the time I was a teenager, I knew the inside of a tea factory, the sections in the gardens the way city children knew their school corridors.

Sankos — The Corner of the World

In 1987, my father was posted to Sankos Tea Estate as Manager. Sankos occupies a particular geography in the Dooars that the planters who have been there never quite forget. It is the last tea estate in Bengal — bordered by Bhutan on one side, separated from Assam by the Sankos river which flows down from the Bhutan hills into India. The planters called it "The Corner" or, with a mixture of dark humour and genuine feeling, "Kala Pani."

Three estates sat in that pocket of land — New Lands, Kumargram, and Sankos. The entire executive population across all three amounted to ten or twelve people. The nearest place where you could buy bread or hire a film was a two-hour drive. You were, in a very specific and non-metaphorical sense, cornered.

I was sixteen. I had no complaints.

The Tasting Room at Sankos

In the evenings I would go to the factory to play badminton with the assistant managers and the staff. Sometimes I went looking for my father, who was usually somewhere in the building attending to the manufacturing. By then I knew the factory floor completely — the withering room, the rolling section, the dryers, the sorting tables. I had grown up around these machines. They held no mystery for me. 

What held mystery was the room next door to the factory assistants' office. The tasting room.

It was a plain space — a long counter, rows of identical cups, small white bowls, tea liquors of different strengths and colours lined up against benchmarks. The day's production set out for evaluation. The ritual of professional tea tasting is precise and almost austere: you work the liquor across your palate, you assess colour, brightness, briskness, body, and aroma, you spit, you move to the next cup. You do this until the language of the leaf begins to make sense to you — until you can read what the soil and the weather and the processing have done to the leaf, and whether the result is correct.

(Centre: My father Narendra Kumar Puri, to the left: my son Parth, to the right, that's me Divya)

I started tasting cups of the day's production against the benchmarks they kept. Hesitantly at first, then with increasing hunger. My father corrected me, guided me, explained without making it feel like a lesson. He had a gift for that.

I began to understand the nuances — the difference that a few degrees of temperature makes in the dryer, the way over-withering flattens a bright Dooars liquor, the particular quality that a Sankos tea had that reflected its specific terroir. I did not have the vocabulary for it yet. I had something better: the instinct, and a father who had been developing his own version of it for twenty years.

Leesh River — The Education Continues

My father moved to Leesh River Tea Estate as Senior Manager in 1988. I was finishing my schooling, heading to Delhi for college. But the holidays brought me back to the factory, to the tasting room, to the cups lined up on the counter.

By the time I finished my graduation, something had settled in me with complete clarity. I wanted to be in tea. Not on the estates as a planter — my path was the cup, not the field. I wanted to taste, to evaluate, to trade. I wanted to work with the finished product the way my father worked with the estate.

Calcutta, 1993 — The Decision

I packed my bags and left for Calcutta in November of 1993. I was twenty-two years old with an Bachelors in Commerce degree, a palate trained in the tasting rooms of Sankos and Leesh River, and the particular confidence of a young man who knows exactly what he wants and is not entirely certain he will get it.

I went looking for jobs in the tea trade. Shaw Wallace called me first — I had an offer as a trainee with them. I declined. Shaw Wallace was liquor. I had not come to Calcutta for liquor.

I went to J. Thomas. I went to Carritt Moran. I went to Duncans — the same Duncan Brothers that my father had joined as a raw assistant manager in 1965, the company whose estates I had grown up on, whose tasting rooms had first put a cup in my hand.

The final interview at Duncans went well. I was selected.

What My Father Gave Me

I have cupped thousands of gardens, evaluated hundreds of thousands of lots, watched the industry transform in ways that neither my father could have anticipated.

People sometimes ask me where I learned to taste tea. The honest answer is: in a small room next to the factory assistants' office at Sankos Tea Estate, in the winter of 1987, standing next to a man who could tell a withered leaf was ready by a single breath of it.

My father spent thirty-seven years in Goodricke Group Limited, one of the largest producers of tea in the country he retired from Aibheel Tea Estate in 2002. He did not rest, he started consulting some tea companies and his magic touch gave them an extra edge.

In 2004, he started a tea company with three partners by the name Castle Hill Industries, I was then heading an advertising firm and executed his branding and packaging, the tea was an instant hit, they were growing month on month. I was tempted to join the business it was something that I loved. It reminded me of my days in Duncans, the tasting room in Duncans was my adda, the Duncans packet tea factory in Siliguri and Indore were familiar learning grounds for me.I spent my career in the space between translating the garden to the market, the leaf to the cup. After two years, one of the partners decided to buy the two partners out, sadly he could not manage the company as he was an accountant who tried to do marketing, blending and tasting. Hindsight it was a good decision and I learnt a free lesson in business. 

In 2015, my wife Shikha an advertising professional with JWT India, decided to give up her job. She took it easy for a few months but had the urge to do something of her own. We would discuss this every morning over cups of tea, I told her to dabble in tea, Papa had rich experience and I had my tea tasting and factory experience. 

I got a crash course in tea tasting from Papa, all that I had learnt from the age of 16, every day was a learning experience. My weekends were devoted to tea, blending and learning from Papa. The picture below was taken in the month of October of 2021, I bought some Autumn Flush Darjeeling tea, which tasted like First Flush. During the tea tasting session, Papa asked me the season of the tea, I asked him to guess, his first reaction was that it tastes like first flush, when I told him that it was Autumn Flush, he commented "You have now learnt to taste tea", his words still echo in my mind. I miss him dearly every time I line up a tea tasting session, I bless him for what he taught me.

On the day I lost my father in January of 2022, we bonded, laughed and shared a cup of tea, little did I know that it would be for the last time. If I could ask for one wish, it would be another cup of tea with my father.

(The third generation : My son Parth started learning Tea Tasting from my father)

Three generations. One leaf. That is the Puri family's particular relationship with tea, and I do not think any of us would have had it any other way.

Divya Puri joined Duncans Tea as a tea taster in 1994. He was born at Thurbo Tea Estate, raised at Vernon Lodge, Darjeeling, and educated in the truest sense in the tea factories of the Dooars and Darjeeling.