Royal Mountain Travel Magazine Royal Mountain Travel Magazine Issue 3 | Page 46

Tea gardens in Nepal

couple of months. The leaves become stronger and some
experts rate this as the best tea. The monsoon flush or “Rainy
tea” is harvested straight after the second flush at the end of
July until the end of September. Due to the continuous rain, this
tea is much more intense and dark making a fuller bodied tea.
Last is the autumn flush that begins in October and lasts till the
end of November. This tea tends to be taste more musky and
has smells more tangy.
Silver tips tea refers to tea made from the very smallest, top leaf
of the shoot. A delicate tasting tea, this fetches the very highest
prices.
CTC tea (crush, tear, curl) refers to the processing and is
produced in lower altitudes in the plains of Nepal, mainly in
Jhapa district. The quality of Nepal’s CTC tea tends to be of
average quality and accounts for about 95% of domestic
consumption.
Nepal’s tea industry is nowadays dominated by private
companies, with the first private orthodox factory, Maloom Tea
Estate being set up in 1993 (from the 1980s, the tea industry
had been a government monopoly). Until 2000, Nepal only
exported around 90,000–136,000 kilos a year, though since
then, production has climbed to about 16 million kilograms of
tea a year, accounting for just 0.4% of the total world tea output.
Tea leaves collected in “Doko”. Photo: RMT.

The World Reveals

46

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May 2014