Tea factory tour
Sal and I had a very nice, relaxing, day in Ella today. I think this is the first time in Sri Lanka we’ve stayed somewhere 3 nights and it was nice not having to get up, pack, and move onto the next town. To celebrate we had a lazy old sleep in and meandered into town for a very chilled breakfast. Our two options for activities today was to do another hike (this one 4 hours long) or go and visit the local tea factory. We chose the tea factory, mainly because we’d left the hike a bit late and the clouds were already looking like it was going to rain.
The tea factory I actually enjoyed way, way more than I thought I would. I don’t really like tea, my soul belongs to coffee, but when in Rome and all that. Sal and I both figured at least it would be interesting to see how it’s made. Or proceeded rather. And we were right, it was really interesting.
We visited on a non-production day which mean all the machines were off for maintenance. A very, very friendly Sri Lankan chap, who’d been working for the company for 40 years, took us around the multiple levels of the huge factory building. Creating tea is a 5 step process (after they pick it). Firstly they use these huge vats and industrial fans to suck moisture out of the levels. Then they go into these huge rolling machines to crush up the leafs. From there the leaves are sorted and set aside to begin fermenting. After that process the leaves are roasted and fed through a hydrostatic machine to get rid of the stalks and stems and stuff.
Lastly (and this was my favourite part) they feed the billions of little bits of roasted tea leaves into a machine that uses lasers, HD cameras, and air blowers to sort out the domestic quality leaves from the export quality. Apparently they’ve only had the machine a year, it’s the latest innovation in tea factory machinery. The thing is amazing, you watch this waterfall of black tea bits fall into it and out the other side comes two very different looking streams of tea product. I just love that there is a company out there that thought ‘we can make a better tea sorting machine’. Talk about making bank on a ‘niche’ market! And so freaking high tech as well. Someone said ‘you know what the tea industry could use more of? LASERS!‘. Genius, give that person a bonus!
Now for some fun little facts; from 100kg of raw leaves you get 20kg of sellable tea, tea pickers are paid $3 a day, our tea factory packs all the tea into these huge 100kg tea bags (lol) and sends them off to auction where Lipton, Dilma etc all bid on them, package them, and sell them. They also do all the flavourings like vanilla and peppermint in Colombo, not at the factories themselves. Sri Lanka produces 310 MILLION kilos of tea a year and the biggest customers are Russia and the Middle East. That’s 1.5 billion kilos of LEAVES that need to be picked, by hand, a year. I think the biggest surprise was that the whole process, from picking the leaf to packaging it for the auction, is only 24 hours long. And 20 hours of that is the first step of removing most of the moisture. Way, way, way quicker than harvesting coffee.
All in all it was a great tour, highly recommended. Even the drive out there was nice because you leave Ella behind very quickly and head into the green tea tree covered hills. The rest of the day was spent doing not much. The rains moved in early and hard. Amazes we sometimes just a phenomenal amount of liquid water can fall from the skies sometimes. But it worked out because Sal and I weren’t up for much anyway.