Week 1: Africa!

When I told a friend (who shall remain nameless here) where I was going, I was asked ‘really, do they grow tea in Kenya?' Well, they do, and lots of it. It's the third largest tea producer in the world behind China and India, and just ahead of Sri Lanka. Kenya exports over 300 million kilos of tea per year, the equivalent weight of 800 fully laden jumbo jets, though tea isn't the ideal material for aircraft construction.  In fact,  Kenyan Tea is an important part of the Tetley blend so you're probably drinking some now. 

I'm going to be spending most of my time in the coastal city of Mombasa, although it is 200 miles from the nearest tea estates, it is the principal port in Kenya and home to one of the most important tea auction centres in the world. This means that just about every leaf plucked in Kenya it will pass through the city on its way to cups and pots around the world, making it an ideal location to learn about the trade.

Flight one on my World Tea Tour took me from Heathrow to Nairobi where I hopped on board the connecting flight, Apparently there was a fantastic view of Kilimanjaro in the distance from the starboard windows, alas I was on the port side and had to take the pilot's word for it. I arrived in Mombasa 9.30 local time, just long enough for it to start heating up to a rather humid 32 degrees centigrade - don't ask me to convert that to Fahrenheit, but I'm pretty sure Michael Fish would be able to fry an egg on the roof of the nearest meteorological office.

The drive from the airport to the office was something of a white-knuckle ride. To get to the city centre we had to dodge potholes, bicycles and the ubiquitous minibus taxis which can appear out of nowhere at high speed. No congestion charge here, the traffic moves somewhat erratically but it moves and we reached the office unscathed. This short trip was made all the more compelling by the promise that I have the use of my very own vehicle while in Mombasa, but more of that later...

During my stay here I'm going to be working with our agents Stansand Africa, which is part of the Tetley Group, so the team are part of a Tetley Tea Tasters' extended family, if you like. We work closely with our colleagues in Kenya, though as it's mainly over the phone and by email, introductions to the team were a question of matching familiar names to unfamiliar faces. The first thing that struck me as a taster was the extra-long tasting counters (about 4 or 5 times the length we'll taste at Tetley). Although the principles of tea making and tasting are still the same as our tasting room in the UK, the sheer number of samples to be tasted and the pace at which it needs to be done are something else. During the week the auction buyer, Robert, has to slurp almost the entire offering from the forthcoming sale and pick out the types that are suited for Tetley blends. So for my first tasting I had to display some fast footwork as the spittoon flew along the counter, accompanied by Robert's astute comments. Over 250 teas in under ten minutes.  The pressure is on, I have four months to increase my knowledge and improve my slurping to try to come close to this...

Next week: the Tea Auction and how to adapt to driving in Mombasa even if your hire car is pink!

Week 2: One week into my stay in Mombasa, it's time to go to the auction...

Every week, the buyers and brokers convene at the East African Tea Trade Association headquarters in down town Mombasa, where tea from across Eastern and Central Africa is sold. It kicks off at 8am so presume that as we were starting early, we might be finished by mid morning. But as around 8,000 tonnes of tea is going to be sold, I perhaps need to revise that end time.

The auction room itself is arranged rather like a lecture theatre, the auctioneer in the middle and all the buyers in their regular places on rows of tiered seats. The atmosphere is friendly, with plenty of warm greetings between old friends - it's more school reunion than bear pit.

There isn't the hushed tension of Sotheby's or Christie's, and nobody parades in front of the buyers holding a cup and saucer. Everybody will have seen the catalogues, tasted the offering, and decided what's right for their customers in advance. At Stansand we had to slurp our way through hundreds of samples in the previous week.

The price tag for tea is quite different too; it's sold by the kilo in US Cents. During the course of the day some buyers may spend enough to buy a Picasso but you'd need your calculator handy to work it out. Oh, and the smallest amount you can buy is a 20 package lot (about 1200kg) so you couldn't pick up some for the kitchen cupboard.

Now, you won't find many of the names of the companies here on your supermarket shelves, but chances are, wherever you are in the world, there will be someone operating in the Mombasa auction buying some of the tea that goes on those shelves. As tea is consumed differently across the globe, teas will have a different value depending on their attributes. UK buyers are looking for tea bag types; Pakistani buyers are bidding up for clean black leaf for loose tea packets; Egyptian buyers favour quick brewing dust teas.

The smartly turned out auctioneer arrives, greets the audience, announces his catalogue, and we're under way. Bids come in loud and clear (there's no chance of coughing at the wrong time and discovering you've bought three tonnes of tea). The auctioneer is always called ‘Sir', though it is part of the polite atmosphere rather than stuffiness or formality.

The first lots fly by, and I can barely keep up, the names of gardens, quantities and buyers called out along with shouts of ‘knock it, sir!', ‘up sir!', ‘go-on, sir!', and plenty of ‘thank-yous'.

Robert gets involved, making bids on the lots we've seen in the tasting room, while Anne, my fellow trainee tea taster at Stansand, records the buying on a laptop (which is something of an innovation in the auction room). I begin to settle into the rhythm and make a note of what we've bought and how far we have left to go.

As we race our way past 10 o'clock I realise that my thoughts of a quick finish were optimistic. There is no break for lunch. I see some buyers being brought Samosas, one UK buyer even remembered to bring his own biscuits. Thankfully Robert had arranged for the Mombasa equivalent of the Cornish Pasty to be sent over. And we get through the auction, finishing a little before 4pm.

Afterwards the team gets back to the office to arrange the contracts and I pull together what information I have gleaned and report back to Tetley in London. All in all, quite a long day.

Away from the auction room, I have now been unleashed on the roads of Mombasa myself, weaving in and out of the potholes, over the randomly placed speed bumps and trying to work out if the set of traffic lights I'm approaching are actually working this time. As I mentioned in my last instalment, I have been given the use of a small car, which comes in a rather fetching colour, probably called ‘metallic lilac' or ‘strawberry dawn' by the manufacturer, but I have to face it that my car is pink. This really puts paid to any kind of tough guy image I might want to cultivate, anyway, it was just the thing to get me to the beach on the Jamhuri Day Holiday (Kenyan Independence Day), where I had time to reflect on a busy week and look forward to the prospect of taking on the auction myself in the coming months...

Week 3: As Christmas approaches, the pressure is on to get everything ready before the break when there will be no auction, in fact just about everything will be shutting down for festivities and the upcoming General Election.

We've therefore had to cram in extra tasting in readiness for the next sale, with two days' worth of teas being auctioned in one session. This week I've been getting to grips with the different tea production areas of East Africa.

When I started my training as a Tea Taster two years ago, we began by learning differences between countries and regions: Assam teas are thick and malty, Ceylon teas light with citrus notes, Malawi teas give good colour, to name but a few. In the Mombasa auction we may only see East African teas, but there is still a great range in characteristics.

The auction lots are divided by tea garden then by leaf grade, so it's a question of learning who is producing which type, what quality we can expect and whether it's the kind of tea we want for the Tetley blend.

There are over 100 Kenyan gardens alone on offer in the auction, that's before we even begin to look at Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda or Burundi. So there's plenty of homework for the trainee tea taster.

Tea growing in Kenya is broadly divided into two main areas - East and West of the Rift Valley. East of the Rift teas are noted for a bright, flavoury brew owing to their location on the slopes of Mount Kenya; teas West of the Rift around the town of Kericho are valued for depth of colour, whereas those in the Nandi hills are lighter.

We grade the lots along the lines of the characteristics that are important to Tetley (if you watch the video on this site you can find out all about it). The nature of the product is such, however, that although you know the district where the tea is from, and therefore the type of tea an individual garden is likely to produce, you still need to be aware of the influence changes in weather or production can have.This is where it's useful to draw on Robert's wealth of experience, knowing when certain marks will be good value or explaining why a certain characteristic has appeared.

With its colonial heritage, the tea trade might seem something rooted in the distant past. However, the first tea was planted in Kenya in the first decade of the 20th Century, and it has really only made an impact on the world market in the last fifty years or so, making it a relative newcomer to the Mombasa commercial scene. This historical context was something I learnt about when my colleague and fellow trainee tea taster, Anne, took me to one of the historical highlights of the city, Fort Jesus. The Fort was built in the 17th Century by the Portuguese and was subsequently occupied by the Omani Arabs, then it was used as a prison under the British before becoming a Kenyan national monument in the 1960s.

The different occupiers left their mark on Fort Jesus, as they have on the city of Mombasa. Today a walk from the Fort to our office, will take you through the narrow streets of the old Arabic Quarter, past the grand Catholic Cathedral, then underneath the Tusks which were constructed for Queen Elizabeth II's Jubilee, which are on Moi avenue, a street bearing the name of a post-independence Kenyan politician. Although people talk about globalisation as if it is a recent phenomenon - the signs of it are here with Japanese, American, Indian and European brands are all visible in shops or on billboards - Mombasa has been a global city in one form or another for hundreds of years.

So now Kenya is bracing itself for a week of festivities and the serious business of the General Election. However Robert assures me whoever wins, things will get back to normal, and there's plenty of tea to taste ready for the auction...