Project Himalaya-Japan 2011 Part 2

April 26, 2011
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Our exchange project between the Japanese, Nepalese and Indian tea producers has been a great success, above all my expectations….

Once installed we spent the night visiting the large factory of the ‘Nepal Small Tea Farmers’ as the fresh leaf, collected the previous day, withered in the troughs. As early morning came the leaf was passed to the rollers and through the rest of the manufacturing process. From the outset the questions were flowing and the pens scribbling noting all the most minute details of this industrial scale operation. The enthusiasm of our visitors was both refreshing and contagious.

The tiny factory in Fikkal, just 15minutes drive, was set up as an experimental project to produce green tea. A small building was built back in 1999 and fitted with small Japanese machines to produces high quality Nepalese teas for the speciality market. This tiny operation is now set up to produce green, white, black and Oolong teas. Due to the fact that this factory was specifically designed for making small batches of experimental quality teas, it fitted with Mr.Iwata’s usual scale of operation, we would end up spending most of our time there.

The Darjeeling clones being used here, coupled with the Himalayan growing conditions, make for a very different leaf stock to that usually used in Japan with these machines. With all this in mind we were hoping to improve the green tea process here with Mr.Iwata’s generations of finely tuned tea farming experience and the in-depth scientific knowledge of Mr.Takeda. At the same time Mr.Iwata has been trying to make black teas back in Japan for almost ten years and had many questions for our Indian expert JP as to how his process could be refined. It was impressive to see how humble about their tea problems each was and generous to share as much information as possible in return.

For a few days we made black tea in the morning and green tea in the afternoon. Any time in between was used to taste and analyse the teas we had made and the many other samples we had all brought with us, discuss machine adjustment and maintenance and field technicalities. Plus of course drinking gallons of tea. Despite the one-track subject matter and intensity, the atmosphere remained light hearted and jovial throughout. To remain sane we imposed what we called the ‘15 minute rule’ where every 2-3 hours we had to talk about something unrelated to tea, this probably helped.

Mr.Takeda, our plant developer, had brought 15 plants with him of a clone he had personally developed called Okumidori. This plant is a hybrid of the Yabukita and Shizu Zai 16 and was bred to have a high resistance to cold and harsh conditions. He thought it would do well here and eventually give a good leaf for green tea. The project had previously tried some traditional Yabukita plants from Japan but they had all but perished so the gift was warmly welcomed. We each planted one and I am already looking forward to checking their progress on my next visit…..

Leaving Nepal we all drove down to the plains and into Dooars one of India’s lesser known tea growing regions. Mr.Takeda had requested a visit to a CTC factory to film some footage for a Japanese TV archive. So we had set up a visit to the Leech River Plantation……
To be continued in Kevin’s next blog….

See also Project Himalaya-Japan 2011 Part 1

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