Teawords: Rendering Quality in the India Tea Industry | 25, Issue 19
Anthropologist SARAH BESKY, PhD considers the relationship between tea’s sensory lexicon and ideas of quality across tea’s colonial history and current-day trading practices, highlighting that quality is far from an objective measure—and that it must be constantly reproduced in practice, including how we choose and use words to adjudicate quality over time.
The SCA is only at the start of a long journey to evolve the cupping system, a tool that has created ripple effects in almost every cup consumed worldwide since its “birth” around the turn of the millennium. Over the past two decades, the cupping protocol’s increasingly important role is evidenced in the breadth of its users, the ubiquity of its quality control system, and the wide number of tailored versions adapted to specific sourcing operations. Historically built upon specialized language—a mix of technical jargon and sensory descriptors—the cupping system was a way to collectively communicate a specific understanding of specialty coffee for those who wished to guarantee and reproduce a kind of coffee experience across producing countries and harvests. It offered a simple way to connect the actors across coffee’s system, but it was built upon a fine balance of art and science— and full of complexity, despite the suggestion that it could easily standardize cup profiles. Since then, our understanding of specialty coffee recognizes the dynamic nature of both the agricultural product and those who drink it: that’s why the SCA has published the new, attributes-based definition of specialty coffee in 2021.[1] Not only does the new definition reflect the very essence of the SCA’s future vision, it also honors the history and traditions that shape our interactions as a community of communities to make coffee better.
This feature from Dr. Sarah Besky, an anthropologist and professor at Cornell University (US), describes a portion of specialty coffee’s historic journey exactly, but for tea, our leafy cousin. The parallels that you will find with coffee will amaze you— Dr. Besky’s gentle narrative offers key insights into the technical concepts and cultural context of a contemporary industry operation founded not only on the shoulders of many people, but on specific words that rewired mindsets of the industry actors. “The pen is mightier than the sword,” they say— often in reference to the power of the written word over violence as a driver of change. What is implied (but often missed) is that words are drivers of change, shaping mindsets, and rendering our (caffeinated) world.
Dr. Besky highlights that what we measure shapes what is counted—not just in terms of the numbers, but in terms of what is deemed important enough to count in the first place. Over the past few years, you may have heard the SCA reference “governance” (decision-making power) as a key workstream of the SCA’s Sustainability Agenda. For me, this feature highlights why the question of “who gets the power to decide” is so important if we want to build a prosperous coffee industry. If you are (or aspire to be) an advocate for a thriving, equitable, and sustainable future of specialty coffee, I suggest an intentional reading of this (skillfully woven) piece to identify every challenge and human connection Dr. Besky describes: the similarities of this snapshot of tea’s history to coffee’s reflects the structural, underlying pattern of our collective challenges, not only as an industry, but as a society.
Andrés Montenegro
Sustainability Director
A close look at the history and contemporary use of the specialized lexicons for wine, cheese, coffee—and the subject of this essay, tea—can tell us much about the pathways that products take across space, from farm to cup, and over time, from colonial to global economies.
Consider words used to describe black tea grown in India: you won’t find these words printed on your bag of PG tips, but they are indispensable tools for the brokers and blenders in the Indian tea industry who work to ensure that your daily cup tastes just right. Most black tea on the global market comes predominantly from former European colonies, from East Africa to Southeast Asia. In these places, tea is plucked, pruned, fermented, dried, rolled, sorted, and packaged by hand, on plantations. From plantations, tea is shipped to auction centers in former colonial port cities like Kolkata, Colombo, and Mombasa, where brokers taste and evaluate it before selling it in public auctions.
Kolkata is the heart of the Indian tea industry. Brokers here evaluate over half of all of the tea produced in North India. Millions of kilograms pass through the hands, under the noses, and across the tongues of these brokers. Tea brokerage is a specialized job. Membership in social clubs, facility with English, European dress, and athletic prowess are all seen as signs of one’s qualification.
On a Tuesday morning in 2009, I joined a broker on the top floor of Nilhat House, India’s oldest auction center. Mr. Pal, a tall, avuncular man, was lecturing apprentice brokers about how to properly evaluate tea in order to give it a valuation price for the weekly auctions that his firm oversaw. A group of assistants quietly brewed dozens of tea samples, carefully timing the steeping of leaves with British-made white enamel clocks. Mr. Pal waxed about tea’s remarkable variability. “It’s an agri-product,” he stressed, “so this is a natural variability.”
A broker’s expertise is measured by his—and it is nearly always his—ability to corral tea’s tastes, smells, looks, and textures into a few words, drawn from a fixed glossary. For example, here is how another broker, Mr. Dutta, evaluated an invoice of tea: He slurped one tea, then the next. “Tippy clonals still have fair make. More emphasis on sorting would be of benefit.”
He smelled a pile of steeped leaves, then slurped the liquor. “Mixed. Fannings are acceptable. Clonal has brightness and character, but quality is not there.” He slurped another cup. “A little short in appearance and also not entirely clean. Bloom is lacking.” Mr. Dutta poured the dry leaf of the next invoice onto a piece of cardstock. He shook it back and forth, giving it a few flicks with the back of his fingertips, before bending the cardstock in his hand and funneling the tea back into the bag.
Printed on the top of each sheet of the cardstock that Mr. Dutta used are the words, “It pays to make good teas.” This phrasing is instructive: Brokers do not see themselves as merely separating the “good” from the average or subpar; they explicitly understand their work as one of active making, of bringing good teas into being. For them, qualification “pays”—it is remunerative to them, to sellers, and to buyers.
In many ways, brokers are aesthetic experts, not unlike storytellers or visual artists. They must hone an ability to craft subjective experiences of taste into words and numbers. As much as numerical price, it is words like make, character, and brightness that indicate a tea’s quality. A list of some 150 terms is published by the Calcutta Tea Traders Association and rendered on glossy posters that adorn brokerage firm walls. These “teawords” are all tools for discerning the quality of tea.
In an interview with me, a Kolkata broker I’ll call Mr. Chetal described learning to be a broker in this way: “You train and train, and one day you realize that you are training yourself through your own processes of experimentation.” He was referring to a broker’s need to creatively combine his sensory faculties, his familiarity with the terms in the glossary of teawords, and his knowledge about the dynamics of the market. For tea brokers, experimentation with words is at the same time experimentation with things and bodies.
As Mr. Chetal explained:
If I said stewy to you, what would you think? It has the characteristics of stew, right? Thick, cloudy. But no, that’s not what it means at all! The meaning is much more exact. It refers to the exhaust temperature. It means that [a tea] was fermented at too high a temperature, that it over-fermented; it therefore has become soft.
In his work on the terms used to describe wine, anthropologist Michael Silverstein noted that such words act as a kind of connective tissue, linking nodes in a product’s trajectory from production to consumption. Teawords such as stewy and soft connect taste, smell, and appearance in the tasting room to events in the field and factory—and they work in combinations: Mr. Chetal’s hypothetical stewy tea was also soft. A soft tea lacked briskness (a liquor that is alive, like fresh spring water). It also lacked brightness (a liquor and leaf whose colorful pop would be visible even when mixed with milk). Seemingly straightforward words like cheesy, minty, and fruity do not reference the sensations of cheese, mint, or fruit. These words signal different “taints” in the teas imparted during storage or transport. Biscuity is a pleasant characteristic, and shotty teas are not “shoddy” at all, but well made. Spongy leaves are actually flat and flaky. An earthy taste, while desired in some wines, indicates that a tea was stored in damp conditions, while winey liquors are over-fermented, albeit in sterile conditions. Mr. Chetal continued, “The language of tea is an intra-trade language. Tea is unlike wine, whose language is applied toward the consumer. [Wine] terms are evocative, finely tuned, and pleasing. They generate emotion.” Tea’s terminology is only an expert language. Consumers who drink tea will likely never be aware that teawords exist. The origins of teawords lie as much in colonial agronomic science as in a colonial economy of prestige, and it is the historical meeting of these two where I have focused my anthropological research.
Negotiating the Language of Quality
In 1911, the Indian Tea Association, or ITA, established the Tocklai Experimental Station in Jorhat, Assam. Early Tocklai experiments, in areas such as pest management, were oriented to maximizing the quantity of tea that plantations could produce. But by 1932, a global economic depression was under way, and consumer buying power was at an ebb. Facing shrinking demand, tea plantations across the British Empire agreed to curb production and focus on making what they termed “quality tea.”
It was in the context of this industry-wide turn to quality that a chemist and meteorologist at Tocklai, C. R. Harler, first proposed a standard glossary. Harler had observed brokerage practices, and he became frustrated that no one in the industry used a common language to describe the characteristics of tea. He elaborated his critique in a 1932 article, in which he complained not only that brokers’ language was unstandardized but also that:
there are a good number of terms used by individual tasters which convey little or nothing to the average planter. Thus, in one case, a tea infusion was described as tasting like a “bandsman’s tunic.” Such an expression connotes unpleasantness, and may denote sweatiness, but gives no definite guidance to a planter who wants to trace a shortcoming in his tea to some incorrect factory procedure.
Phrases like “bandsman’s tunic,” while long on poetics and certainly descriptive, were metaphorical. Their material referents lay outside the chain of sites along which tea traveled.
Harler argued that it was possible to link teawords to production processes. He proposed not just to narrow the number of descriptive terms to be used, but to identify which chemical constituents of tea were responsible, either wholly or in part, for qualities like sweatiness— or rawness, briskness, pungency, strength, color, or thickness. In 1934, the ITA submitted Harler’s glossary to the Tea Brokers’ Association of London for comment; the tea brokers agreed to reduce their evaluative language to a finite number of terms.
They came up with a revised glossary, which was forwarded to the ITA’s Calcutta office for further refinement, in consultation with Tocklai scientists. After that round of revision, the glossary was returned to the Tea Brokers’ Association for final revisions, followed by approval by the ITA’s London- based scientific advisory committee. Word by word, representatives from the plantation, brokerage, and scientific sectors settled on terms for describing the qualities of dry leaves, steeped leaves, and tea liquor.
For example, the term bakey refers to the taste of infused tea liquor. In his original glossary, Harler defined bakey as “a slightly high fired tea.” The 1934 revision by the ITA London Committee and the Tea Brokers’ Association revised that definition to: “Defective or faulty firing and sometimes slightly over fired.” Once the glossary was returned to scientists at Tocklai, they amplified the definition further, to add the phrase: “Certain instances of ‘bakeyness’ have been associated with bacterial infection.” When Tocklai’s revisions were reviewed back in London by the Tea Brokers’ Association, they deleted the final sentence about “bacterial infection.” In the final glossary, published in 1938, bakey is defined as follows: “Faulty firing, not necessarily at too high a temperature but often due to leaves being too long or too thickly spread in the dryer.”
Harler’s efforts brought forth a debate about the definition and boundaries of “quality.” Take bakey: Tocklai scientists wanted to link a “bakey” sensation to bacteria, but brokers and planters consistently rejected such direct causal references. According to brokers and planters, in order to be effective tools for maximizing quality, teawords needed to be standardized enough to be mutually intelligible, but not so standardized that they became distinct categories of “goods” and “bads.” Quality was not so stable. It had to be constantly reproduced and rediscovered in practice, including linguistic practice.
As the revisions were going on, in 1935, the ITA appointed Cambridge University biologist Frank Engledow to form a commission of enquiry to identify a way forward for the industry in the context of depression-induced crop restrictions, looming world war, and a rising tide of anticolonial sentiment. India would become independent by 1947, but even then, there was no clear sign that British capital would be expelled from the country. Engledow’s mission, then, was to find a way to ensure the sustained dominance of British capital in the subcontinent after the formal end of empire: he was charged with ensuring the continued market dominance of tea over other stimulants like coffee and cocoa.
The Engledow Commission’s survey of plantation owners and managers revealed that the “improvement of quality” remained the membership’s highest priority, but Engledow, the biologist, remained skeptical. After all, what counted as quality was still determined in large measure by a group of brokers whose practices remained largely illegible to science. Imperfect as it was, the new glossary had the potential to link British scientific practice (represented by Tocklai), British aesthetic practice (represented by tea brokers), and British productive practice (embodied by the plantation complex).
To do this, the Engledow Commission proposed “a new specification of quality,” in which the professional broker would become “a key-member of the scientific staff.” For the commission, the objective of scientific investigation should be “to connect cause and effect”: to understand the relationships between the sensory and material qualities of tea, as assessed by brokers, and notions of greater or lesser quality, as reflected in market price.
Engledow believed that this could be done if brokers used not just a controlled lexicon, but only five descriptive words: color, strength, pungency, quality, and flavor. With this limited lexicon, the brokers’ body would become a kind of laboratory instrument. Its measurements would be calibrated to a known standard set by practitioners of the new science of industrial chemistry; these five words each correlated to a sensory experience of taste, look, and feel. Those experiences indirectly pointed to different aspects of plantation field and factory production.
Between the 1940s and 1950s, chemists worked with a panel of professional brokers to use these five terms, along with a strict set of criteria set out by Engledow. For example, a tea’s “colour” could be judged to be equal to, better, or worse than a known standard, using a formal grading system. Engledow’s goal was to make the monetary pricing of tea entirely subject to scientific scrutiny—to slowly eliminate any hint of aesthetic sensibility from the market. In fact, he ultimately wanted to eliminate brokers altogether. In the end, this mission failed: Engledow’s five words never replaced the larger glossary, and science has not supplanted brokerage. But this work did help make the brokerage practice look more like a laboratory practice.
The brewing of tea in tasting rooms in Calcutta and London came to be more standardized across different brokers and brokerage firms. It began to be synchronized by precise clocks. Weights of tea and volumes of water, even the crockery out of which tasters slurped their tea, were all now more tightly articulated, all in the aim of assessing—and stabilizing—quality. ◇
SARAH BESKY, PhD is an anthropologist at the ILR School at Cornell University (USA). She is the author of Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea (2020) and The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair Trade Tea Plantations in India (2014), both published by the University of California Press.
References
[1] Specialty Coffee Association, Towards a Definition of Specialty Coffee: Building an Understanding Based on Attributes (September 2021), https://sca.coffee/sca-news/just-released-new-sca-white-paper-towards-a-definition-of-specialty-coffee.
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