Black Tea

Black teas are fully oxidized teas. Legends recount that in the seventeenth century, a cargo of tea that arrived in London from China, at the end of a particularly long voyage, had gone moldy in its boxes.

Originally green, it had turned black but in spite of this, the English found it very much to their taste and immediately re-ordered it. Though improbable, this anecdote does point the way to China, where this method of manufacturing black tea originated.

In the nineteenth century, when they began the cultivation and manufacture of tea in India, the British first made use of the Chinese labor, but they quickly perfected the tools needed to mechanize the different stages of the so-called ‘ORTHODOX’ process.

The leaves are processed in six different operations: Withering, Rolling, Riddling, Oxidation, Firing, and Sorting.