Revealed: How Ahmad Tea create their world-famous tea blends

In this interview, Ahmad Tea's Tea Taster Dominic talks about the importance of using the best quality individual teas from around the world when creating Ahmad Tea tea blends. He then talks about the characteristics of high quality teas, such as Darjeeling, low grown and high grown Ceylon, teas from Africa, and Assam teas from Northern India. Finally, he talks about the beauty of the Sri Lankan tea estates and the other responsibilities of a tea taster at Ahmad Tea, where the department tastes about 400 cups of tea a day. Exerts from the interview: Interviewer: Hey Dom, could you tell me what’s the most important thing in the creation of tea blends? Dominic: The most important thing in the creation of tea blends really is, like with any recipe, is the ingredients you use. So you have to use, if you want to have a high quality tea blend, you nee to use high quality individual teas. So at Ahmad Tea we source the best teas from different origins all around the world. From Africa, from Asia and from China are the main places we get our tea from. And each of those teas, even from a different region, even from in different countries or even from within different parts of the countries. So from Will in India you get tea grown in the south and you get tea grown in the north of India and all of those teas will have different characteristics. So really depending on the blend that you want to make, if you want to make a strong blend you need to use strong teas, maybe a style of manufacturer, which is going to give you a quick infusion if you want a tea bag or a more traditional orthodox manufacturer if you want a loose-leaf tea. So it’s really about picking high quality ingredients and thinking about what final blend you want and allocating suitable teas accordingly. Interviewer: And what are some of the most interesting and special moments you’ve had in your tea tasting career? Dominic: I think for me the most interesting moments I’ve ever had is actually visiting the tea plantations. Firstly its fantastic to actually meet and see the people making the tea and have some discussion with them about how they’re doing it, get some greater understanding and eventually even influence how they’re making the teas. And really the other thing is to actually realise that something we sort of treat as such as every day object actually comes from such beautiful and exotic and remote places so yeah it was fantastic to go and visit the tea estates. Interviewer: And finally could you talk us through some of the processes that take place in the tea tasting room. Dominic: Yeah we have two main responsibilities, which is we do the buying here and we’re also responsible for creating new blends and then the QC of our production. But buying we receive offers from public auctions (teas sold in public auctions all around the world in major tea producing countries) and also we receive offers privately from plantation companies. So we receive thousands of individual samples from different tea gardens from all around the world, which we assess to see whether they’re suitable for any of our blends. Then the other responsibilities we have is for quality control throughout the whole process. Which is insuring the right quality that what we’ve purchased has actually been shipped to our factories. And also that the final production, the blends and the actual packed products, are also coming out to the agreed standard. So that just basically involves a lot of tasting, we always taste every cup against an agreed standard. And we taste about on average 400 cups a day.