I had an opportunity to update my ‘operating system’ to learn more about tea.  I keep wondering, how I started drinking tea. Despite growing in Southern India, where there is a strong habit of Coffee and Tea, I chose to avoid both till I joined work 13 years back. The tea machines, and on Indian Railways were my first blushes with tea. Till date, I used to visualise tea as a neccesary evil in the mornings, which I never paid attention to the taste, unless it deviated off the basic taste scale that I had.

The tea festival held in JW Marriot in Bengaluru was an eye opener for me, on the various varieties of flavours of tea that is available. The various aromas that are there, quite pleasantly had me listening in to learn more about this. As I soaked in the aromas, I could sense the depth in some of them. I saw some strong tea varieties, and some very different ones from Turkey, and was blissfully observing people talk about Tea and thoughts.

There is a more detailed series of posts coming up, but for now, do have a glimpse of how the event went on.

There were workshops for Tea tasting and Tea appreciation. There was quite a crowd for these events. This was a session hosted by Anamika Singh who runs her own tea business called the ‘Anandini Himalaya Tea Company’. When she was running her session, I saw her passion and knowledge in letting people know about the subtelities in the art of certain tea brews.

One of the brews she had for us for a tea-chocolate pairing workshop. She neatly poured out the tea, initially half cup for everyone and then filled the cups, to make sure that the brew was consistent for all people. It looked like the sunset had chosen to rest in the glass, with that shade of golden brown.

We had 3 varieties of chocalates to put in our mouth after taking a sip of the tea. I quite enjoyed the chocolate melting in my mouth since it had warm tea waiting to attack the chocolate and create a blend. I was not quite able to spot the blend with my taste buds, since I was distracted by the sweet feeling of chocolate melting in my mouth with the tea brew.

Susmita, the main organiser is seen conducting a session, where she is talking about the ‘First Flush’ variety of tea from Darjeeling which is about Rs 16,000 for a kilogram of tea powder. This is from one of the companies that were present called ‘Tea Philosophy’.

Some of the first few workshops were interesting that they took us to the history behind how Tea originated in India presented by a couple of people who work as Tea Scientists. My whole perception was that the Brits invented tea when they were in India, but the history of tea dates back to around 2000 years in China. That ends my first update on the festival. Look forward to 2 more parts of exploring a few varieties of tea and some history behind it. Do know more about the festival through the website or by checking some of the tweets around with the festival with the #TFI or #TeaFestivalIndia