Tea Tasting at Kanan Devan Hills plantation at Munnar, Kerala

My husband and I had recently been to Munnar, Kerala in India. A very touristy thing to do there is to visit a tea factory where they explain the entire tea-making process. On our way out of the factory we spotted a small note about special tea-tasting sessions in the mornings.

Quite excited we returned the next day for the tea tasting only to find out that it is arranged for big groups of atleast 10-15 people. We were very disappointed as we had traveled a real long way to make it in time for the session. The organizer, seeing our disappointment checked with his manager if it was okay to arrange the session for just the two of us. He agreed :)

We were taken to a special tea tasting room. He began with an apology because setting up the entire session would take him atleast 10-15 minutes. We were of course okay with this. It actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise because we got to see the entire preparation that goes behind arranging one such session. Additionally, the room was full of trivia about tea going through all of which kept us fairly busy.

The preparation mainly involved boiling 2 pots of water; laying down about 30 different varieties of tea comprising 3 main types - Orthodox, CTC, Green (among these were also flavoured teas); washing and neatly laying down about 30 white ceramic bowls and cups.

Some trivia: Orthodox tea refers to either hand-processed tea or tea that is rolled with machinery in a manner that mimics hand-rolling. The opposite of orthodox tea is CTC tea, which is machine-processed in a way that chops the leaves into uniformly-sized bits that are typically used for low-grade teabags.

The organizer then meticulously weighed and put 2.5 gms of each variety of tea into its corresponding cup. Each cup was filled upto brim with hot water. The cups were then covered allowing the tea to infuse for about 2-3 minutes (except the green teas which were allowed to infuse for about a minute only else the tea could go bitter). Each one was strained into the bowls.

The teas were ready for tasting now. Deepak and I were each given a spoon to taste. Thus began the real fun of tasting some of the best quality of tea in India. Each one had a very distinct flavor. They were arranged in an increasing fashion of the lighter varieties to the strong ones.

The one both Deepak and I liked the most was Rose Tea. It had a very refreshing combination of taste and aroma. In fact we bought a pack to take back home.

After tasting all 30, one spoon each, we were asked to pick our favourites and have the entire bowl. We both picked the rose tea except that Deepak picked the orthodox rose tea and I picked the rose green tea :)

This was an extremely exotic, exclusive experience for tea lovers like us and will always remain etched in our memory :) :)