This story is from November 21, 2017

Woman planter teas off with a yellow brew

The next time you wake up to the fresh aroma of an Assamese brew, try out a new variety that a planter from Golaghat district has added to the long list of teas from the state—green tea, black tea, white tea, oolong tea, orthodox tea, phalap (traditional handmade tea of the Singpho tribe) and the all time favourite CTC.
Woman planter teas off with a yellow brew
GUWAHATI: The next time you wake up to the fresh aroma of an Assamese brew, try out a new variety that a planter from Golaghat district has added to the long list of teas from the state—green tea, black tea, white tea, oolong tea, orthodox tea, phalap (traditional handmade tea of the Singpho tribe) and the all time favourite CTC.
Planter Rakhi Saikia, perhaps for the first time, has introduced yellow tea as a choice for the morning cuppa.
It’s one of the “rarest” brews from China, and is also known as “royal tea” she explained.
Produced in China’s mountainous Hunan, Zhejiang and Sichuan provinces, the tea needs special skills to prepare. Saikia, who owns a 99-hectare organic tea plantation in Golaghat’s Barpathar area, said she started experimenting with yellow tea after consulting different Chinese texts and making some changes in the technique to suit local conditions.
Pradip Baruah, a senior scientist at Tocklai Tea Research Institute in Jorhat, provided the technical guidance. “On October 23, my experiment yielded success. I got the light yellow colour that I was looking for. The tea has a fruity flavour with an aroma of night jasmine and a hint of sweetness. This is the characteristic of yellow tea. Initially, there was some problem, but later I perfected it through constant monitoring and meticulous handling of the parameters,” Rakhi said.
Rakhi has produced 8kg of yellow tea and a Kolkata-based broker has shown interest in procuring it. “I succeeded in making the yellow tea with buds, leaves and a combination of buds and leaves. I opted for buds and leaves because making yellow tea with buds alone is very costly and time-consuming.
Since I am new to this variety, I did not want to take the risk of increasing the cost of production by using only buds,” explained the planter. What sets apart Saikia’s yellow tea is the drying process. “In China, they use pans for drying. But I opted for a special dryer,” she said.
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