Each of SMC's two Dooars tea estates, Soongachi and New Glencoe, has
its own factory. The estates themselves are huge - according to
figures I've seen, the Dooars region as a whole produces ten times as
much tea as Darjeeling - but, even knowing that, I wasn't ready for
the scale of the factories. I'm not sure exactly what I expected, but
the factories seemed staggeringly large. In one withering area alone,
you could almost play soccer. (You might want more vertical
clearance, though.)

The factories work by a combination of heavy power equipment and hand
work. Unloading trucks full of leaves is done by hand, and it's heavy
work. There are furnaces, industrial scale blowers, and overhead
conveyors snaking around, but there are also men using straw brooms to
spread out the finished granules to ferment and dry in thin layers.
Once that's done, the granules go back into the industrial age to be
dried some more under heat and then automatically heat-sealed into
packages mechanically created from a continuously fed tube of thin
plastic.

The CTC process, which is basically what they do, was invented by
Indians according to SMC, and he feels rueful about it because it
enables consumers to brew a dark cup with less leaf, depressing the
market. I was surprised to hear that the CTC rollers, the big metal
cylinders with jagged teeth arrayed in an intricate pattern, are
manufactured on site. Once you've seen those rollers, "crush, tear,
curl" becomes almost painfully clear.

The aromas in some areas of the factories are very strong. In the
withering area, there's a scent of fresh green leaf, but at a level of
intensity far beyond what you'd smell in any field: scary, almost. In
the area where the granules ferment, the aroma is just as strong but
quite different: maybe yeasty, winey, or like a cider press, but not
exactly like any of them.

/Lew
---
Lew Perin /
http://www.panix.com/~perin/babelcarp.html
BRO wisdom: DRIVE SKILLFULLY LIVE FUNFULLY