Types of Darjeeling Tea: Black, White, Oolong, Green and the Bushes Behind Them

That light touch is why a first flush can look half green in the packet. As our founder puts it, a Darjeeling “is as much an oolong as a black tea.” Our procurement team describes first flush dry leaf as having “a greenish hue,” with a liquor running from “sparkling gold to lighter shades of gold and even Champagne in case of Moonlight whites.”

The recipe changes with the season. “Unlike the Nilgiris, here every flush demands a different manufacturing pattern,” Veena Chordia of our procurement team told us in her first Darjeeling spring. Muscatel leaf, for example, is usually given a short wither and a longer oxidation, “cooked to perfection.”

Some black teas are made by hand on special nights. At Seeyok, an annual full-moon harvest sends 50 women out by lantern light to pluck the estate’s best section, and the batch is made into a muscatel. J.P. Gurung, one of Darjeeling’s most senior tea professionals, explained the custom to us. Seeyok still makes our summer muscatel: Seeyok Summer Muscatel Black.

How the leaf becomes black tea, step by step, is in How tea is made.

Spring “Moonlight” whites from estates such as Badamtam, Castleton and Margaret’s Hope are among the most prized teas the hills make. See What is white tea?

How Moonlight whites are made

The Moonlight name comes from Yunnan’s Yue Guang Bai white tea. In Darjeeling the leaf gets minimal withering and the lightest of rolling, and the season is often just a week or so. A plucker collects just a few kilos in a special Moonlight round, against 10 to 12 kg on a normal day.

Quantities are tiny. Castleton’s Moonlight White came to just 4 kilograms for the 2015 first flush and 12 kg for the second. Around ten Darjeeling estates now make Moonlight whites. Peter Keen, writing for us, called the name “a fairly overt marketing claim: the mix of buds and leaf, harvesting, drying and expert judgment.”

Our whites, lot by lot

• Badamtam: our Spring Moonlight comes from section 9 of the Lamas division, at 4,500 feet, picked by specialist pluckers. It is made from a mix of the fragrant AV2, P126 and B157 clones.
• Mim: in spring 2018 a hailstorm before plucking “released flavors never before tasted” in our Mim white.
• Wonder Spring White: our master tasters evaluated over 150 white tea batches one spring and chose just 4 to 5 lots for it.

Oolong

Darjeeling oolong was first made at Namring in the early 1990s, when Sumon Majumder experimented with Taiwanese methods. He was not happy with his first attempt, but it sold to Haelssen and Lyon of Hamburg, “the first time Namring had made and sold oolong.” In 1994 he joined Darjeeling Consolidated, then owner of Singbulli and Balasun, and took oolong with him.

Others followed. Singbulli makes oolong from AV2 bushes in its Tingling division. Goomtee bought a special Taiwanese machine to make oolongs, and Mim is known for oolongs from its clonal bushes. Glenburn’s Moonshine oolong is a modern example. More in What is oolong tea?

Green tea

Darjeeling green tea is heated soon after plucking to stop oxidation, giving a smooth, floral, gently vegetal cup. At Namring, green tea is made by “steaming the leaf and not fermenting it.” Our Darjeeling Green Tea is a whole-leaf example. See What is green tea?

Chinary: the old bushes

Darjeeling’s first gardens were planted with China-type seed, and many of those Chinary bushes are still producing. At Castleton, about 70% of the estate is Chinary, some of it over 130 years old. Margaret’s Hope works vintage Chinary bushes up to 100 years old, and Giddapahar’s autumn teas come from century-old China bushes.

Margaret’s Hope is about 90% Chinary, some very old and some just under 20 years. “With a good chinary you never know what to expect. It surprises you,” Arun Gurung, assistant manager of its Maharani division, told us. Goomtee’s first plucking of 2018 came from tea bushes over 50 years old, and its Chinary sections are more than 130 years old.

Clonals: the selected bushes

In recent decades, gardens have also planted clonals: bushes grown from cuttings of selected plants, such as the fragrant AV2 clone. Darjeeling clones are named for the estate that created them: AV2 stands for Ambari Vegetative, and its floral lift is “often described as ‘melon.’” A new clonal takes at least seven years from introduction to full-scale production.

AV2 is one of around thirty Darjeeling clonals; B157 comes from Bannockburn and P312 from Phoobsering. Gardens mix them with their old bushes:

• Margaret’s Hope: the 10% that is not Chinary is AV2, Takdah 7-8 (which “produces maximum tips”) and N-436.
• Castleton: its clones include AV2 and “Seeyok 1240.” AV2 leaves are short, grow stunted and look bright light green at the tips.
• Singbulli: our autumn tea there comes from AV2 clonals, an exclusive batch made for Teabox.

Which to choose

Labels often say which you are getting. Chinary teas tend to be more delicate and complex; clonal teas are often brighter, greener and more fragrant. Gomden puts the difference this way: Chinary flavors “differ significantly from place to place. Clonals, on the other hand, more or less produce the same flavor profiles, with varying intensities dependent on altitude.” See Chinary, Assam and clonal tea plants for more.