Inside the Teabox Tasting Room: How We Taste Every Lot

Siliguri sits in the plains below Darjeeling, “parked perfectly between all the fine estates around Darjeeling, Assam and Nepal,” as one of our team wrote, which is why tasting and selection happen there. Our facility is about three hours from the Darjeeling estates, and Castleton is about an hour away.

Samples within hours

Because we are close to the gardens, we receive samples within about 12 hours of production, and each one is graded on four things: moisture, the dry leaf, the brewed leaf and the liquor. When a lot passes our eight quality checks at the garden, it reaches our facility within 24 to 48 hours of being made. Our current procurement rules ask for QC tastings of all incoming teas every day.

The first cups of a season

The first samples of a season draw a crowd. When Namring’s spring black arrived one March morning in 2019, “the tea tasting table is still surrounded by everyone wanting their first sip of the season,” and the tea went live the next evening. In July 2021 the first Assam second flush samples came in one morning from Halmari, Dikom and Doomni, and our tasters cupped them the same day.

On the road

In peak season the tasting goes to the gardens. In November 2021 our founder, our procurement heads and our master tasters spent two days traveling across Darjeeling and Sikkim, sampling fresh autumn teas from Goomtee, Jungpana, Giddapahar, Bermiok, Singbulli and Oaks. Back at base, “From tasting fresh arrivals, rigorous quality checks, complaint assessments, and copious research, the tasting room feels like a giant living entity.”

Our buyers spend a lot of that time in the gardens. In his first year with us, Ravi Kothari visited the Darjeeling gardens at least three times a week in procurement season, with yearly trips to Assam and the Nilgiris.

At the height of spring, one tea from one division of an estate can arrive as 20 samples, and every division makes tea, which is how the counts climb so fast.

The counts are the tasters’ own estimates, and they argue over them. In October 2022 Gomden reckoned “close to 11456 cups this year”; Avishek countered that with chai samplings it was “closer to 24,678 cups”; and Gopal Upadhyay asked, “What’s the point of this count? Autumn flush is here, the number will just go up!”

The ritual and the people

The tasting only works if every cup is brewed the same way. In our tasting room that job belongs to Rupojit Roy: laying the setup, measuring the samples, steeping for the specified time, straining and pouring, so that “the tasters never sample a cup steeped the wrong way.”

In June 2024 we introduced the tasting team like this:

• Avishek Mondal: 14+ years in tea, and our specialist in sourcing the finest Darjeeling teas.
• Ravi Kothari: 15+ years as a taster, buyer and blender, who started as a trainee in a tea broking firm.
• Gopal Upadhyay: over 15 years in the industry, whose own favorites are the delicate Moonlight whites.
• Arun Kumar Gomden: our most senior member, with over 50 years in tea, and the fourth generation of his family in the trade.

Our buyers judge details many producers never expect. Ravi Kothari, who came to our procurement team from tea broking in 2015, recalls checking every sample’s moisture, flakes and flavor profile, and a well-known producer “shocked and offended” when his teas failed. Read his story in Meet the team: Ravi Kothari, Tea Buyer. Another producer told him the quality of his teas had improved since we started buying from him.

Blenders taste too. Shruti, who came to our Siliguri office from blending tea in Seattle, sampled between 40 and 45 teas a week, and “Gomden sir (an old tea hand)” was one of the rare few colleagues who gave her critical feedback.

The mood at the bench

When the first Nilgiri winter samples arrived in January 2023, the room woke up. Avishek: “Thank god! At last, I can get back to my ‘actual’ work.” Ravi: “The Nilgiri samples look good this year! Should we bet which one is gonna be a winner?” And Gomden: “There should be less talking, and more slurping.”

Notes are argued over before they are written down. For one Castleton spring tea in June 2021, our founder, Ravi and Avishek disagreed over how strong its roasted chestnut was; the discussion lasted 55 minutes. The final note, from Arun Kumar Gomden, ended: “Subtle sensation of roasted chestnuts interlaced with hints of ripe stone-fruits shore up around the edges … Furtive notes of elderberry can be picked up in the aftertaste.”

The cups kept coming as they talked. Our founder found the chestnut “subtle”; Ravi called it “quite heavy”; Avishek sided with the founder; and the team tasted two, two, three and then four more cups between each turn before the note was locked. That tea is Castleton Spring Chinary Black.

Sometimes the verdict is quick. Tasting a 2023 muscatel, Avishek heard peach, muscat grapes and red berries, and Gomden simply said, “This is a tea not to be missed. Ravi, let’s buy this!!”

Tasting is how we read a harvest. “The early tastings give a clear idea of the weather in the area. At a deeper level the personality of the maker comes through,” our founder wrote in March 2022. Sometimes the verdict is hard.

“After sampling over 1578 cups in the past month, I concur that the First Flush (FF) ’22 doesn’t compare to the quality of the past few years. In terms of quality & flavor, it lacks the soul of Darjeeling teas.”

A month later the tasters were surprised the other way: an early second flush, one sip, and “it’s going to be a good harvest.” A short spring, an early summer and heavy floods had looked like “the perfect recipe for a disastrous Second Flush harvest,” but by September the 5,456 cups we had sampled told “an entirely different story.”

That is the real point of cupping: honest judgments, made cup by cup. For how each season tastes, see Seasons of tea.