The life and times of a tea taster
In a chat with Kurush Bharucha, whose long career as a tea taster, buyer, blender, recipe designer, quality custodian and ambassador for tea, reveals fascinating stories
Last year I met Kurush Bharucha, a tea veteran who was wrapping up a 40-year career with the multinational Unilever, where he worked as a taster, buyer, blender, recipe designer, quality custodian and ambassador for tea. Now back in Mumbai from the UK, Kurush talks about how he became a tea taster, a rather uncommon choice of profession then, and even now. While finishing college in Mumbai, back in 1985, Kurush came across an ad for a management trainee—saleroom at Brooke Bond, owned by Unilever at the time. Assuming it was a sales role, he applied, and a few months later, arrived in Kolkata. That’s when he learnt that “saleroom" referred to the tea auction room, where tea samples were tasted and traded every week. And so his career began, taking him to into the company of an incredible variety of teas.
He says,“To think that all this variety came from a single plant—Camellia sinensis—how awesome was that. I was utterly fascinated—one plant, six families, 2,000 varieties, and 5,000 years of history. I could never imagine that such a profession could even exist."
At the heart of his job was the skill he developed as a professional tea taster. Tasting, he says, underpins the entire tea supply chain, beginning at the estate where tea is made. Most estates have a tasting room, where they evaluate the teas they’ve produced—both to assess quality and to catch any faults. From there, the teas move to brokers, who act as intermediaries between producers and buyers. They too taste, but from the lens of the market, gauging demand. Then come the buyers—wholesalers, big brands, and retailers—who “cup" tea from the lens of value discovery. And finally, there are the blenders, who taste with a focus on consistency.
Much of the tea we buy from stores is blended, carrying the promise of consistent taste. Because tea quality can vary, a blender’s tasting experience is critical to shaping the final blend. “Buyers and blenders are two sides of the same coin," says Kurush. They need to understand one another’s roles and the challenges that come with them.
At the start of his career, he spent several years in each of the six auction locations: Kolkata, Siliguri, Guwahati, Cochin, Coonoor and Coimbatore. This is the drill for tea buyers, where tasting up to 1,000 cups some days allows one to develop a palate memory strong enough to recognise a garden by its tea.
Tea tasting may appear subjective but Kurush talks about the “huge amount of objective calibration, process and rigour" built into it. And “while laboratory devices measure several tea attributes, ultimately tea tasting is what best combines art and craft, logic and magic, science and storytelling."
We still don’t have formal college courses in tea tasting, and learning on the job remains the best way forward. But there’s access now to online tea education—look up the UK Tea Academy, Australian Tea Masters, or the International Tea Masters Association. Kurush leads two modules on teas from India and Africa for the UK Tea Academy’s World Tea Diploma.
Tea Nanny is a fortnightly series on the world of tea. Aravinda Anantharaman is a tea drinker, writer and editor. She posts @AravindaAnanth1
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