Single-Estate Loose Leaf Tea

Bukhial is 595.78 hectares in Golaghat district, Assam, and makes about a million kilograms of tea a year. Borengajuli, up in Udalguri, is 655.97 hectares and about 1.3 million. Tarajulie, in Sonitpur, is 510.5. Those are addresses, and a single-estate tea is a tea that has one.

The letters after the name are the trade's shorthand, older than most of the gardens using them. TGFOP is Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe, a grade above OP, marked by the golden tips in the leaf. BOP is Broken Orange Pekoe, the broken grade that fills bags. Where the orange came from is unsettled: some say the Dutch House of Orange-Nassau, some the coppery colour of the finished leaf. Pekoe may come from an Amoy word for the white down on a young bud.

The other half of a garden's name is a date. In Darjeeling the March-to-May picking gives a light, floral cup with a little astringency; the May-and-June one carries the muscatel. India's first geographical indication, granted in 2004, fences that name to eighty-seven gardens and roughly 17,500 hectares, and nobody outside them may print it.

So the season goes on the tin: Sungma Estate, 1st Flush (Darjeeling) for March, June brings Margaret's Hope Estate, 2nd Flush (Darjeeling), with a second garden beside it in Risheehat Estate, 2nd Flush (Darjeeling). Assam Estate TGFOP carries the tips its letters promise, while Assam Estate CTC BOP is the hard pellet built to brew fast and dark. Kenilworth Ceylon comes off an estate established in 1880, and Korakundah Estate, Organic off a Nilgiri garden at 7,920 feet.