Why the checklist?

Borrowing a leaf from English tea

Would you like a cup of tea? Can I offer you a cup of tea? A cup of tea please? I could go on and on but these are some of the questions the English will ask you in terms of refreshments as long as you are on British soil. Forget about our “can I offer you a drink?  Juice?  soda? ….. Tea is the way to go in Britain!   

I say this, not borrowed from the Downton Abbey series, neither borrowed from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre or Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, just hard experience in person from a recent trip to the UK.

Anyone familiar with the British culture knows how committed these folks are to their tea. In fact, it is believed that tea will always come in handy to sooth your worries and ailments or even neutralize a whole day’s stress

One would even say that tea is very resourceful!

Having said that, while in the UK, I was fortunate to visit a tea factory with a few colleagues I had gone with. At R. Twining& Co. Ltd tea factory, I witnessed the process of tea making at all its stages. I got to learn how to make the perfect cup of tea and also how to tell the difference between tea blends (or at least I have an idea of how its done).We started with the blending department where we discovered that the company makes over 30 different blends of tea produced and sold to the market, including countries like Uganda and Kenya where raw tea leaves are imported from.

We were shown how different blends including white tea, lemon, strawberry, Chamomile, Hazel nut chai, wild berries, African honey bush mandarin and orange, breakfast blend, chai to mention a few were made. Now do not ask me how the blends are named because honestly, I don’t know. I didn’t ask, I was more into the process of tea making.

I noticed that Twining is a tea fully fledged factory that keeps innovating new blends of tea for a variety of people to experience. My attention was grasped by one of their latest experiments through a partnership with British Airways which entailed creating tea that can work best at altitude. After in flight extensive testing with BA customers, they created an innovative new blend of the nation’s favourite drink (of course tea), perfectly balanced to create a great tasting tea at 35,000 feet, meaning that one would have the best cup of tea while flying in the air and not even crave for anything better outside the plane.

Tea tasting 

The new type of tea known as “cut tear and curl”, a blend of Assam, Kenyan and high grown Ceylon tea,  is a classic combination giving body, strength, flavor and colour, a  bias towards the Assam produce of  a well-rounded, full-bodied blend, while the Kenyan gives it strength and lift and the Ceylon adds flavor. The tea has been specifically created for the airline in three-pint bags to enable cabin crew to serve the new blend straight from the pot. I was amazed. I mean here is someone, taking his time to make tea that can taste better at altitude. I got curious and asked Michael Wright the Senior Buyer Blender Product Development Manager at Twining who was taking us through the process, how they were able to determine and select the best blend for altitude?

He said, “Making a tea blend isn’t as easy as it looks especially when you are looking to make one that comes out right when at altitude. It took a couple of trips from London to New York of tea tasting just to get the right blend for British Airways.” Now when I tasted the tea, I could not easily tell the difference and to this Michael said tea testing is not as simple as it looks. For one to be able to tell the difference in the blends, one should have had proper training and good experience for at least five years or even more. This is when ones five senses become more proactive than ever.

According to tea facts, water boils and reduces by 2ºF for every 1,000 ft. This means that water boils at 100ºC at sea level, and at 66.6ºC at 30,000 feet. On an aircraft, the cabin is pressurised to 8,000 feet, which means water boils at 91ºC, which explains why you can never get your tea as hot in the air as it is on the ground. The first airline meal was served on May 1, 1927 on a silver service to Paris when customers were served beef tea.

A cross section of tea blends

Now i don’t know about you, but I think it is a bit frustrating to take a lukewarm cup of tea on a cold 8 hours long flight. To go around this, Mike Wright advices that for the best cup of tea, keep everything hot, warm the individual cup or teapot first before you add any water, and for the best mug of tea, leave the tea bag in for a minute. Anymore and your cup will stew and any less and you will not have the perfect flavor.

After, we moved to the factory where the actual tea production takes place. Here we were able to witness how the tea is put into what we term as tea bags, packaged in to their boxes and then set aside for distribution. After seeing this process, I was amazed at how much can be done in so little time. I mean in this room you have over 20 machines that work on different kinds of blends, each of those machines is making the packaging; the tea bags are being sliced, filled and sealed then put into the boxes which are then later collected and sealed each in their categories. Each box of tea bags taking about 10 minutes or so. Work is made simpler and faster which cuts on expenditure and over sized supervision since the machines are programmed to work.

After this experience I realized that Uganda has so much potential, despite the fact that we export tea to these countries. We can always work hard with the government and support potentially identified tea growing areas of Kabarole, Bushenyi, Kanungu, Rukungiri, Mityana, Kibaale, Hoima, Kisoro, Wakiso, Mabarara and Nebbi/Zewu.

If we came up with innovative ideas that would expand our tea processing, we would be able to export finished products to European countries; and who knows, maybe we would also come up with a variety of different kinds of blends within the tea. We will not have to add flavours like Tea Masala, Ginger directly in the tea but may be have these spices within the tea bags themselves or tea leaves. This way, we will be heeding our Presidents advice on exporting processed food staffs to increase our revenue returns.