Korakundah Plantation - India

This month's tea is an organic green and comes from the world-famous Korakundah plantation in India. Located in the Nilgiri Mountains where the low-yielding tea results in a higher concentration of flavour. The tea gardens located here are some of the most beautiful to visit in the world. The elevation means that high-quality tea with a smooth, well-balanced flavour is produced, and the land is untouched by chemicals.

The Korakundah Tea Estate has been helping to reduce the number of invasive species in the area and pride themselves on maintaining sustainability and biodiversity, some of the wildlife you might encounter include porcupines, deer, sloth bears and leopards! The estate is small, but they produce high-quality organic tea with the utmost respect for the land. The estate specialises in organic black and green teas. In India, Chai is the most popular drink, which is black tea mixed with milk and spices. You can find it from street vendors and in Luxury Chai cafes. 

So how did tea first get to India? It is believed that silk caravans travelling from China brought tea into India centuries ago. Even though the Camillia Sinesis plant is a native species to India, its value was not recognised until much later. Despite some evidence of tea drinking dating back centuries, the usage of tea seems to have been mostly medicinal or used in cooking. The British introduced tea to India on a commercial level as a means to disrupt the Chinese monopoly on tea as they found that Indian soil was suitable for cultivation. Today India is the second-largest tea producer in the world - after China. There are 43,293 tea gardens across Assam, 62,213 in Nilgiris, and 85 in Darjeeling.