Description
Ceylon Devagiri Silver Tips is a well made black tea that comes from Devagiri Tea Estate, located in Galle District, Southern Province, Sri Lanka. This particular Silver Tips features a smooth deep character with malty and fruity notes and pleasant tannins on the aftertaste. This current batch is from the Spring 2024 harvest.
The ‘Silver Tips’ name comes from the appearance of the leaves as they feature silver or slightly golden tips, which points to the high quality nature of this tea. This is a low-grown Sri Lankan tea, grade FBOPFEXSP, or Flowery Broken Orange Pekoe Fannings Extra Special. This is a grade renowned for a good balance of flavour and great aroma. While higher altitude teas are highly prized in Sri Lanka, lower altitude estates do produce some fantastic teas that have a fuller character, often full of exotic tropical notes.
The tea farmers in Sri Lanka have had a difficult recent past, with the government encouraging more farmers to switch to CTC (crush, tear, curl) methods of tea production in the 1990’s, trying to capture the huge CTC market. CTC tea is normally used to fill tea bags, so the move was away from quality and onto quantity. This switch from orthodox methods was a big failure as Sri Lankan teas could not compete with cheaper CTC teas from other large and at the time up-and-coming CTC tea growing countries, such as India, Kenya and Malawi. This move also damaged the reputation and quality of Sri Lankan tea, resulting in many farmers choosing to eventually abandon CTC production in favour of orthodox methods of tea production. Now Sri Lanka is rightly regaining its status as a major exporter of high quality orthodox teas and there are more and more interesting and exciting producers of these Ceylon teas, such as this Ceylon Silver Tips from Devagiri Tea Estate.
Devagiri Tea Estate is located in Yakkalamulla Village next to Kottawa rainforest, making the soil naturally rich in natural nutrients. Being located in a valley, it benefits from highly oxygenated air from the rainforest as well as warm air currents from the Indian Ocean that is only 9 miles away. The first tea plants at Devagiri Tea Estate were planted in the 1930’s, still under the British rule. A year before Sri Lanka’s independence, the tea estate was bought by Francis Nanayakkara who is the grandfather of Rosh, one of the current owners of the estate. Over time Devagiri built a reputation for producing some of the finest teas in the south of Sri Lanka. During political turmoil in Sri Lanka in 2020 the tea estate fell on hard times and there was talk of the family selling the estate, most likely to be used for other agricultural uses. This would have had a devastating effect on the community of almost 100 people living and working on the estate.
Rosh (Francis’s granddaughter) and her partner Mike were struck by the potential injustice while visiting the estate in 2022. But they also saw an opportunity to develop a new business model that relied less on market volatility and traditional multi-level supply chain. They raised investment and started creating a business that puts the people who produce the tea at the forefront of the business while maintaining best environmental practices. Their ethos also lies in enabling the consumer to be able to trace the tea to a specific terroir, and make an informed decision on where their tea comes from and the sort of business they are supporting with their purchase.
This Silver Tips black tea from Devagiri Tea Estate has small neat leaves with a good amount of silver tips. The liquor produced is a dark ruby colour with a malty aroma. The overall taste of the tea is balanced, but with a deep flavour that has stony and malty notes. There are also pronounced fruity notes and lighter notes of leather and wood. The aftertaste is lasting with a pleasant amount of tannins at the end.
It is best brewed with water at 90°C for 3-4 minutes and the leaves can be brewed around 2 times.
Ceylon Devagiri Silver Tips black tea was first featured in our February 2025 Curious Tea Subscription Boxes.
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